Beloved home migration from xt:Commerce to OXID eShop

Development of an OXID store customer data migration with password transfer

Geliebtes Zuhause GmbH (Gründau / Lieblos) is the operator of www.geliebtes-zuhause.de, a leading and fast-growing online store for "Lovely Home Fashion, Design and Living" with a focus on Nordic countries. As part of a technical OXID store update in combination with a redesign of the store design, eWorks, as an OXID partner of the first hour from nearby Frankfurt, was commissioned with a data migration from the existing xt:Commerce store to the new OXID eShop Enterprise Edition (OXID EE). In this way, all existing customers were to be able to continue to log in and shop in the new OXID store using their access data.

When migrating customer data, special attention is naturally paid to customer access data: because store passwords are stored "encrypted" in the store database, a way must be found to migrate them to the new store anyway and use them to log in there. ("Encrypted" in quotation marks because it is not encryption in the cryptographic sense, but a so-called "hash function" such as MD5 or SHA1 - (almost) irreversible, mathematical one-way mappings). eWorks made the supposedly impossible possible and developed an OXID module that transfers store login names and passwords from the old xtCommerce store to the new OXID store so that existing customers can continue to log in to the store despite the store relaunch.

eWorks supported its client from the start of the project by first analyzing the existing xtCommerce database (after providing the MySQL schema and database content) and then carefully preparing the migration. In particular, an individual xtCommerce-OXID migration script was developed through PHP programming, which automatically migrated all xt:Commerce customer accounts including the "encrypted" access data to OXID eShop. eWorks also provided support in automatically assigning customers to customer groups in the new store based on defined criteria, for example domestic and foreign customers or new customers. The additional import of article data from the previous xtc store into the new OXID store planned at the start of the project was, however, shelved during the course of the project because the direct store connection to the Tradebyte PIM "TB.One" (Product Information Management System) now seemed more advantageous - the Tradebyte-OXID connection via interface made this seem superfluous. Finally, the data migration of the real customer data was carried out directly on the live system after a suitable date had been found in consultation with the client, which only had a minimal impact on ongoing store operations.

xt:Commerce and the OXID eShop Enterprise Edition (OXID-EE) were used for software development, as well as PHP and MySQL, on which they are based. In contrast to xt:Commerce, the OXID source code is only available in encrypted form, but this does not represent an obstacle because the modular OXID structure makes it easy and secure to integrate your own OXID programming using so-called "OXID modules".

Finally, eWorks supported its client in informing all affected customers about the new store by creating customized SQL queries to select and export customers based on shop-specific characteristics. These store data exports formed the basis for sending newsletters to all existing customers affected by the changeover even before the newly developed OXID store went live.

The store operator went live with its revamped web store as planned and benefits from the existing regular customers, who can continue to log in to the newly developed Oxid store with their usual access data - and with an almost 100% automation rate, i.e. without time-consuming and cost-intensive, error-prone manual reworking following the automatic data migration.

Used technologies

HTML / CSS
JavaScript / jQuery
PHP

Related references

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