This is really frustrating.
I've been using the old CS-Cart for about three years now (1.3.5) and recently decided to upgrade to the 21st century and get 2.0.
I had 2.1.2 installed. Although, CS-Cart was able to pull categories, products, & pages from the old cart and recreate them with the same product ids and page ids, the links are different because the links are formatted differently.
For instance, what use to be:
index.php?target=categories&category_id=394
is now
index.php?dispatch=categories.view&category_id=394
target is no dispatch and categories is now categories.view
Why? If it was the same, and I launched the new site, Google would notice zero change. Now when I launch it, all of the old links are going to be NO good! If I do a 301 redirect, my links loose 60% to 70% of their orginial value. I wish CS-Cart just suck to the same format of index.php?target=categories&category_id=.
Plus, why did they get rid of TOPICS? uhh
This is so frustrating. Sorry, for my rant.
Welcome to the 21st century.
Just be thankful it’s not anywhere near as bad as Obama’s “Change”. 
Edit: On a side note, if you were using SEO friendly URL’s, this wouldn’t be an issue.
[quote name='The Tool' timestamp='1316813996' post='122187']
Edit: On a side note, if you were using SEO friendly URL's, this wouldn't be an issue.
[/quote]
Sorry, we were using the SEO in the old 1.3.5 and new 2.? but we still lost most, if not all of our links. The new cart messed with the url of most of the pages and knocked out tons of links. The end “html” may have stayed the same, but it added the categories in to the link. We tried a few of the suggestions here on the forum and beyond, but we still lost most of our links in.
[quote name='clips' timestamp='1316823526' post='122192']
Sorry, we were using the SEO in the old 1.3.5 and new 2.? but we still lost most, if not all of our links. The new cart messed with the url of most of the pages and knocked out tons of links. The end “html” may have stayed the same, but it added the categories in to the link. We tried a few of the suggestions here on the forum and beyond, but we still lost most of our links in.
[/quote]
Isolated incident. Mine have been the same since I can remember.
Edit: You do know it's configurable right?
I helped a guy upgrade from 1.3.x to 2.2.2 and he had some redirect issues as well since he wasn't using the SEO addon. I struggled with it for a while and finally hired someone to make a .htaccess 301 redirect for me.
My solution is at 301 redirects between 1.3.5 sp3 and 2.1.4 - Hints & Modifications - CS-Cart Community Forums
I hope that helps,
Brandon
It would be nice if you could type out custom links on each page, etc, sort of like you can do with WordPress and permalinks.
That way, I could just rename the link the same link that I had on my old site. DONE!
You kind of can. Just go to the addons tab on the product details page and change the SEO name to whatever you want.
I've done this with most of my categories, but you can do it with categories, products, pages, etc.
Hope that helps,
Brandon