[StellarBytes]

Hi Folks.

Since I've just moved a rather large store from Interspire Shopping Cart to CS-Cart, I thought this may be helpful to others looking to do the same (includes functionality for BigCommerce, too).

There are literally hundreds of steps in transferring everything (customers, orders, products, sales statistics, etc,), but one of the most important changes...

Redirecting customers from your old URL's (Interspire) to your new URL's (CS-Cart) - including products, categories and pages.

For this fix to work effectively, because of the way Interspire - poorly - handles URL's by generating the URL string from the Product/Category/Page name, thus, URL's always become capitalised, with no option to disable in Interspire, you must, unless you want to create all your URL's from scratch, replace uppercase with lowercase, here's how:

You will require access to your server root (commonly known as SSH), to edit the httpd.conf (usually found in /etc/httpd/ but now more commonly in /usr/local/apache/conf/). If you do not have access to httpd.conf, don't worry, you may not even need it - if you visit yoursite.com/TestPage.html and it does load yoursite.com/testpage.html, then you don't need this step.

Add the following lines to your servers httpd.conf file:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteMap  lc int:tolower
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} [A-Z]
RewriteRule (.*) ${lc:$1} [R=301,L]

At the root of your CS-Cart store, open .htaccess and add the following lines directly below "RewriteBase /":

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} [A-Z]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !\.(?:png|gif|ico|swf|jpg|jpeg|js|css|php)$
RewriteRule (.*) ${lc:http://www.domain.com/$1} [R=301,L]

RedirectMatch 301 ^/categories/(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1

RedirectMatch 301 ^/products/(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1

RedirectMatch 301 ^/pages/(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1

Replacing domain.com with your site URL

This will strip the /categories/, /products/ and /pages/ string from the URL, as well as convert the uppercase to lowercase, therefore the generated SEO name in CS-Cart *should* automatically work when browsing to the old URL.

Most importantly, this uses 301 redirects (ie. "Moved Permanently") therefore is the most SEO friendly way to switch between Interspire/Big Commerce and CS-Cart.

Hope that helps someone, many thanks to Adrian8 for his assistance in providing the base of this fix.

Enjoy your new CS-Cart store

[snorocket]

StellarBytes, on 29 November 2011 - 12:05 PM, said:

Since I've just moved a rather large store from Interspire Shopping Cart to CS-Cart, I thought this may be helpful to others looking to do the same (includes functionality for BigCommerce, too).

WOW theirs alot of folks dumping Interspire for CS lately, I don't think they've had an update in over 2 yrs...lol - Sno

[robobear]

Thanks for the tip regarding capitalization in the urls, Stellar. I've modified the cs-cart SEO add-on to mimic the ISC urls for products and categories, but forgot about the capitalization. We're starting to plan our move from ISC to CS-cart, and it's a daunting project...

[StellarBytes]

robobear, on 23 January 2012 - 06:08 AM, said:

We're starting to plan our move from ISC to CS-cart, and it's a daunting project...

It doesn't have to be...I employed Cart2Cart to do the initial transfer of customers, orders and products, which was far from perfect. However, after a few weeks of manually adding, altering and merging data in the database directly, I pretty much had all the ISC data within CS Cart in a useable format. Wasn't 100% perfect, but near enough.

[WebWatch]

StellarBytes, on 23 January 2012 - 12:58 PM, said:

It doesn't have to be...I employed Cart2Cart to do the initial transfer of customers, orders and products, which was far from perfect. However, after a few weeks of manually adding, altering and merging data in the database directly, I pretty much had all the ISC data within CS Cart in a useable format. Wasn't 100% perfect, but near enough.

Interesting, I am also preparing for the move from ISC to CS-Cart and will use Cart2Cart for the move.
Can you provide more info on what did not work perfectly ?

What can I expect to be messing with manually after that move ?

[Consultant]

I'm a CS-Cart user (we are still on a 18-month old version). I'm surprised I'm seeing people come from Interspire. They are behind BigCommerce which is widely regarded as one of the top 3 low-cost hosted solutions and their Ultimate Edition looks very feature reach. My only guess is those coming are smaller shops that could not afford the $1,800 Ultimate Edition and were using Starter or Professional or are there some other major reasons you moved to CS-Cart?

The E-bay selling function alone in version 6 looks very attractive:

"List your products on eBay as an auction or BIN listing in about 5 clicks. Orders are created automatically in your store when an auction is won or a BIN listing is purchased."


As does the MailChimp integration. Are there some major holes in functionality I've overlooked or is the software buggy? Poor support?

Reason I ask is I have a larger client (multi-million dollar business) that could afford the Ultimate Edition and the Ebay integration would save us a lot of coding time.

But then we may be better off going with CS-Cart 3 in the long run. Definitely using CS-Cart for smaller businesses still. It still is the best bang for the buck.

[StellarBytes]

Product updates: Virtually none (I think 2 very minor bug fixes supplied in the past 12+ months).

Support: Non-existent. One of the worst I've ever dealt with and there has been some really bad experiences.

[Brandeline]

Actually with many of the people who are jumping ship on Interspire Cart, it is not just about the money and whether you have the money to purchase the full shebang Ultimate version from them.

I have two stores currently running Interspire and I am really considering moving off to CS-Cart. One of those stores I did pay the $1800 for the Ultimate, the other I paid $1000 for the Professional.

While there is no doubt that the Interspire & Big Commerce folks are excellent marketers and pretty good at "reputation management", what I and others keep running up against is that many of their features are only good on paper and they are not willing to put their money where their mouth is most of the time to really prioritize fixing them or making them work properly.

Once you start really exploring how things work in ISC, there are huge gaps that make no sense. Nor are they willing to fix these things. They actively remove topics from their forums that indicate customer dissatisfaction so that other new customers don't know about these things rather than simply fixing them.

I have had running bugs the entire time I;ve used the ISC cart. My checkout spontaneously stops submitting credit cards randomly for one thing. I have never been able to reproduce it in controlled conditions, but I have been told over and over by customers who had their wallet out that they could not purchase. They submit their credit card, and nothing at all happens. Yet sometimes it works fine. Who knows how many customers have never said anything, just put their wallets away and went somewhere else? I suspect a lot from the number of incomplete orders I find in the reports that made it all the way to the credit card section and then stopped.

Additionally many of those moving away from ISC are developers, or people with developer experience (like me) who are just tired of fighting with them. Many of these people have actually gone and fixed some of the bugs themselves, and have offered the code publicly, yet several versions later, Interspire/BigCommerce can't be bothered to even apply the fixes that were handed to them.They really took what could have been a great product and just let it stagnate.

On top of that, there are currently several known huge security holes in ISC for which the only fix is to upgrade to their currently even buggier 6.1.8. They will not release a patch for this for past customers preferring instead to demand additional licensing fees of upwards of $500 to $1000 for the latest version. Now to my mind, it would be just good business to fix something that serious and offer a patch to all clients. The fact that they won't is just one reason of many that I will be departing.

For me, it seems foolish to continue to throw good money after bad! If I'm going to have to migrate, and pay fees again on a cart, why not find a vendor where the customers are actually getting what they were promised in the glossy ads? I want someone I can trust to deliver what they promise. From my experience, Interspire is not it.

[parodius420]

snorocket, on 29 November 2011 - 11:58 PM, said:

WOW theirs alot of folks dumping Interspire for CS lately, I don't think they've had an update in over 2 yrs...lol - Sno

Starting July 1, 2012 they will no longer be selling the Interspire part, and doing Big only.

[StellarBytes]

parodius420, on 23 May 2012 - 04:26 PM, said:

Starting July 1, 2012 they will no longer be selling the Interspire part, and doing Big only.

Not only are they no longer selling it, as of July 1st they will not be offering support contracts, including renewals, so your Interspire cart will only be supported up to a maximum June 30th 2013 if support is renewed for 12 months on the final available date for sale.

Very poor business practise - although it has been quite evident for a few years now that Mitch Harper & co jumped on the get-rich-quick bandwagon.

[cartaddon]

yeah the makers of interspire shopping cart dont care their customers which left most of us hanging. some stays and continuing/modifying their codes and some jumped to other carts. however there are team that are really supporting the cart which also created a service pack of it. They caleld "Interspire Shopping Cart Service Pack" it is intended to help those interspire customers who was left hanging and it is also free to use.

However, on all our clients store, we're using magento, cscart and interspire shopping cart service pack version.
we cant focus into 1 cart as it varies on clients need and budget.

[Cart2Cart]

If you consider store migration to CS-Cart, you should turn your mind to Cart2Cart service. It will perform the accurate migration of products, customers, orders, and other necessary store data from Interspire to CS-Cart. The migration is quick and automated, with no programming skills necessary and no software installation required. The prices are flexible and depend on the quantity of items you need to transfer. As to the service issues, we admit of not being perfect, but we constantly improve to provide you with best migration experience. We will appreciate if you leave your feedback and suggestions for us to consider: http://cart2cart.betaeasy.com/
Also, in case of any questions or issues, please feel free to contact our Support Team which will gladly provide answers and will lead you through the migration process.

[Onkel_Sid]

What do you guys do about SEO after migrating from Interspire to CS-Cart? It will be a lot of broken links in Google. Is it a way to keep the links working and keep your rank at Google after the migration?

[Cart2Cart]

Onkel_Sid, on 13 November 2012 - 02:42 PM, said:

What do you guys do about SEO after migrating from Interspire to CS-Cart? It will be a lot of broken links in Google. Is it a way to keep the links working and keep your rank at Google after the migration?

Hello Onkel,

Cart2Cart migrates only meta information (meta keywords and meta description), but not URLs due to technical peculiarities of specific shopping carts. However, you don't have to worry about broken links and your store SEO after the migration.
You can set URLs by yourself without any difficulties.
We recommend to define all the URLs on your existing website, implement 301 redirects for all of them and outline the pages on the new site where the URLs will be redirected to. This way, the external links will be referred to the active pages and search engines will easily crawl your website and the store SEO will be not affected.

[sadangel965]

Cart2Cart, on 09 January 2013 - 10:58 AM, said:

Hello Onkel,

Cart2Cart migrates only meta information (meta keywords and meta description), but not URLs due to technical peculiarities of specific shopping carts. However, you don't have to worry about broken links and your store SEO after the migration.
You can set URLs by yourself without any difficulties.
We recommend to define all the URLs on your existing website, implement 301 redirects for all of them and outline the pages on the new site where the URLs will be redirected to. This way, the external links will be referred to the active pages and search engines will easily crawl your website and the store SEO will be not affected.

Dear Cart2cart i recently passed from interspire to cs cart and had all my data transfered by you,is there a way to keep the existing url's without using the 301 redirect?

[StellarBytes]

sadangel965, on 06 February 2013 - 02:58 AM, said:

Dear Cart2cart i recently passed from interspire to cs cart and had all my data transfered by you,is there a way to keep the existing url's without using the 301 redirect?

Not without considerable changes to CS-Cart, which would have to be re-done every time you upgrade the cart software.

You would be better creating the necessary 301 redirects, once they're picked up by search engines, you shouldn't have any further problems.