Importing customer reviews into a new shop without the customers who gave the review

[30knees]

Hi,

I'd like to import customer reviews from my old shop into the new shop. I didn't import the old customer accounts, so I can't map the reviews to existing customer IDs.

What would be the best way to import the customer reviews?

Can I assign each review to a new unique customer ID without any associated information such as email address, physical address, etc., but with their name/initials?

If so, how do I do this without messing up the customer ID table that already exists in the new shop?

And how can I mark the new unique customer IDs as guest accounts?

Thanks!

[30knees]

No ideas? :(

[dynambee]

How were the reviews created originally? I don't think PS has a default review function so I guess you used a module?

How hard this will be to do will greatly depend on how the module stored that review information. Can you share the database table structure that the module used to store the reviews?

Heading offline for a few hours here but if you can get the db table information I can probably tell you how hard it will be to move that data across.

[SLiCK_303]

You could set the customer id to your id.. just a thought, kinda lame, but it would work.

[dynambee]

@slick_303 said in Importing customer reviews into a new shop without the customers who gave the review:

You could set the customer id to your id.. just a thought, kinda lame, but it would work.

It seems like this would make all the reviews appear to have been written by one person.

[SLiCK_303]

yup it would, thats why its a lame suggestion.... ;)

[SLiCK_303]

You could use an idcustomer of 0, that way it's a guest, but then I think you need a unique idguest, not sure what would happen if you left the id_guest blank.....

[DaoKakao]

Another lame suggestion: to make some users with id starting from lets say 1000000, import reviews and assign those ids for imported reviews.

[dynambee]

It would be much better to use IDs assigned by the system when the customers are imported, this makes sure there are no odd conflicts now or in the future.

The problem is that the new IDs, whatever they are, won't match the IDs from the old system and therefore won't match the IDs in the reviews table. Therefore whatever is used to transfer the customers to the new store has to keep track of the old IDs and the new IDs, and then has to update the review data to point to the new IDs.

If there are 10 customers and 25 reviews this can just be done manually. However if there are hundreds of customers and thousands of reviews then a script is going to need to be written to do the transfer.

@30knees, how much data do you have to transfer? Any details about the review system you've been using?

[30knees]

Hi all!

Thank you so much for helping out! :)

The old system has the following table entries for reviews:

reviewsid productsid customersid customersname reviewsrating dateadded reviews_text

[As an aside: One nice thing about that is that one could edit customersname independently of customersid ... as I understand tb, the displayed customersname (or the equivalent) for reviews is pulled from the name connected to the customersid, so it's hard for customers to submit a review using a nickname.]

[dynambee]

So the next question becomes.... Do your product IDs match between the old store and the new store? If all the product ID's match then moving the reviews across is probably possible with a bit of work. However if the product IDs don't match then it is going to be much more difficult.

[30knees]

The product IDs don't match, but I have them all mapped out. For example, I know that 32 old = 64 new.

[dynambee]

I would do a test with a couple of different reviews. Manually enter them into the table on your new site using the new productsid but set customerid = 0.

If it works then you just need a small script to move the data from one database to another, updating the products_id values as it goes.

How many reviews do you need to move?

[30knees]

Super, I'll try and report! It's not a lot of reviews. Maybe 60 or so.