X-Cart forums

[Triple A Racing]

Our opinion FWIW is this:

If you're perfectly happy using your XC4 store, then don't change anything! It's still going to be very well supported by lots of good, Non X-Cart companies as well as X-Cart themselves. Quite simple really.

If you feel the need for change and you do want to change from XC4 to XC5 then do it (as we did a long time ago as an early XC5 adopter). However.... we'd say don't bother trying to migrate either via the official X-Cart method or your own scripts or tricks etc especially if you have a heavily modified XC4 store. Create a new XC5 store from scratch (see below)

THIS post, in another thread on the XC4 / XC5 subject, is possibly a good explanation as to why and we agree wholeheartedly with the "start from scratch" comment that's made in that post. You'll need time and resources to do this though, don't forget.

Meaning, build your XC5 store (and a mimic dev store we'd say) on a separate server / host whilst you continue to trade with your XC4 store. This gives you time to test / check and then re-test and re-check everything but with no loss of online trading at all. Once you've checked the checker and your XC5 store is 100% good to go, make your DNS changes and switch over from XC4 to XC5. Afterwards, archive everything in detail from your XC4 store for future reference and then extract all records that you might need, in a format that you can easy access locally. That's worked quite well for us.

The last paragraph is what we did (and at a time suitable for annual accounts too) We had an FAQ section explaining the changes and why XC4 accounts / profiles etc were no longer valid and advising customers who wanted an XC5 account / profile to create a new one etc (although quite often, customers order anonymously anyway and then they repeat order anonymously which is easy to do in XC5, so it wasn't a big issue at all in the end. Your experience might vary obviously but...

Finally, if you're totally new to X-Cart, than it makes common and commercial sense to opt for XC5 because a) you cannot buy an XC4 licence now anyway but seriously b) Once your'e past the steep learning curve and feeling comfortable with creating your XC5 own modules (or buying very well developed third party XC5 modules, of which, there are quite a few) then XC5 can be very heavily customised to your satisfaction, but in a way that dispenses with "patches" and "reworking core coding" etc when it comes to installing the latest XC5 upgrades.

XC5 is far from perfect, but it's 1000% better than it was, when it was first launched. We're really quite happy with it (most of the time) these days.

[cflsystems]

Originally Posted by Triple A Racing

However.... we'd say don't bother trying to migrate either via the official X-Cart method or your own scripts or tricks etc especially if you have a heavily modified XC4 store. Create a new XC5 store from scratch (see below)

I don't really agree with this.

If you have stock (or almost stock) store it is ok to use the migration wizard. It has been improved lately and apart from few hiccups works very good now.

If you have customized store - getting the data transferred with custom scripts is the way to go. And it is possible. I have done it on few stores so far and there is no problem with this approach.

Starting from scratch is acceptable if you are willing to lose all data you have in the store but usually this is not the case.

It does cost to do custom scripts but there is also the factor of pissed off customers who will go to your competition if you choose to start from scratch. Weight the risk vs cost in a long run. There is always a solution or should we call it "the lesser evil"...

[Triple A Racing]

Originally Posted by cflsystems

I don't really agree with this

Well that's good! We did say it was our opinion FWIW and that "Your experience might vary..."

Originally Posted by cflsystems

If you have stock (or almost stock) store it is ok to use the migration wizard. It has been improved lately and apart from few hiccups works very good now

Yep we still wouldn't, but it maybe as you say "the lesser evil" in this specific case.

Originally Posted by cflsystems

If you have customized store - getting the data transferred with custom scripts is the way to go. And it is possible. I have done it on few stores so far and there is no problem with this approach

We know YOU definitely could provide such scripts but we mentioned scripts (and tricks) because many people "think" they can simply write their own script (having never written one before) run it and boom! Job done. That's not reality unfortunately.

Originally Posted by cflsystems

Starting from scratch is acceptable if you are willing to lose all data you have in the store but usually this is not the case

There's no need to lose all data. You can (and we did) transfer i.e. copy, edit and upload XC4 product data to XC5. It's a slow process sure, but you're not losing any trading as your XC4 store is still live whilst this is going on.

Originally Posted by cflsystems

It does cost to do custom scripts but there is also the factor of pissed off customers who will go to your competition if you choose to start from scratch. Weight the risk vs cost in a long run. There is always a solution or should we call it "the lesser evil"...

If you don't do it correctly and have downtime, yes agreed, but that wasn't our experience to be fair. Our XC4 stored traded until day XX and then our XC5 store took over. A seamless change at 2:00am on day XX. From memory, we didn't have any "pissed off" customers go elsewhere because they had to create a fresh XC5 profile, but they could have just voted silently of course

[Triple A Racing]

Originally Posted by cflsystems

If you have stock (or almost stock) store it is ok to use the migration wizard. It has been improved lately and apart from few hiccups works very good now...

Quite possibly, just pure coincidence and/or the store owner's (or their service provider's) error, but the first item on the list in THIS POST yesterday...

[tony_sologubov]

Hi guys!

Thank you so much for your feedback! It is truly appreciated.

I would want to address several points mentioned in the discussion:

Originally Posted by cflsystems

Any other way of making changes to XC5 should be consider temporary and unsafe. Even the built-in template modifier won't do you much good if you need to edit template multiple times or replace a template...

You can pretty safely apply changes to templates via Webmaster Mode. If there are cases in which it does not work, please give me an example as we would want to address that.

Besides that, X-Cart 5.4 will have more tools to edit templates out of the box, including adding new templates.

Originally Posted by Triple A Racing

we'd say don't bother trying to migrate either via the official X-Cart method or your own scripts or tricks etc especially if you have a heavily modified XC4 store. Create a new XC5 store from scratch

I would agree with you a couple of years ago, but since then we heavily improved our Migration Wizard module. I work on migration data pretty much every day and if you have a small to medium size store, you can migrate your data within 15-30 minutes. And the store will work perfectly fine after that.
https://market.x-cart.com/addons/migration-wizard.html

However, I do agree that if you have custom functionality or just a specific store's config, it will require you to test quite a bit to make sure that X-Cart 5 works exactly as you need. We have piled up a checklist to help you with this task:
https://kb.x-cart.com/modules/xc4_to_xc5_migration_wizard/using_the_xc4_to_xc5_migration_wizard.html#check...ore-going-live

[tony_sologubov]

If you have any questions/comments about the upgrade process from X-Cart 4 to X-Cart 5, I will be happy to address them.

Just let me know!

Tony

[cflsystems]

Originally Posted by tony_sologubov

I would agree with you a couple of years ago, but since then we heavily improved our Migration Wizard module. I work on migration data pretty much every day and if you have a small to medium size store, you can migrate your data within 15-30 minutes. And the store will work perfectly fine after that.

Please define "small to medium size store".
I have done it with stores with about:
- 2599 customers
- 50-200 categories

- 1000 - 1500 products
- 5000-10000 orders
- not counting the rest - like settings, pages, reviews, options, variants, etc


It takes couple hours. Which is still pretty fast compared to what it was before. And I consider this somewhere between small and medium size store more towards the small store size. So it is not 15-20 minutes.

[tony_sologubov]

Originally Posted by cflsystems

Please define "small to medium size store".
I have done it with stores with about:
- 2599 customers
- 50-200 categories

- 1000 - 1500 products
- 5000-10000 orders
- not counting the rest - like settings, pages, reviews, options, variants, etc


It takes couple hours. Which is still pretty fast compared to what it was before. And I consider this somewhere between small and medium size store more towards the small store size. So it is not 15-20 minutes.

I would say this is a medium size store.
Just recently I migrated a store with kind of the same numbers and it took me about 30 minutes.
I used X-Cart hosting as a server environment for that.

[cflsystems]

To give you complete picture I don't actually stay and look at the screen waiting for it to finish I turn it on, it says 1 hour left or 2 hours left and I go to lunch. It runs pretty consistently so my guess is the time shown is somewhat accurate.


Anyway - whether it is 30 min or 1 hour - the point is the migration wizard is running pretty good now for stock stores. Still few hiccups to take care of - as outlined by me earlier - but in general it works ok.

[tony_sologubov]

Originally Posted by cflsystems

Anyway - whether it is 30 min or 1 hour - the point is the migration wizard is running pretty good now for stock stores. Still few hiccups to take care of - as outlined by me earlier - but in general it works ok.

Thanks for the kind words, Steve! I appreciate it!

Tony