[tboshart]

Hello all,

I am jumping ship, and am moving my store from Prostores to here, finally. Are there any previous Prostores people here? If so, any tips on making the transition smoother?

I now have 3000+ products to upload via CSV, and then get the pictures loaded. Oh joy!! But I think it is going to be worth the pain.

I was debating using the Thumbnail Generator, but, with 10k+ images from my prostores server, and only 3k products, I'd have to get rid of all the images except the Main photos, and trimming 7k photo's out of one folder seems harder then just manually adding the images one by one, after I upload the products.csv file...

Any tips from non-prostores people? (keep in mind the site is not taking orders yet, and it's a basic template, no mods done to it)

Teresa
Top Shelf Games
www.topshelfgames.com (prostores is .net but it will be going bye bye soon)

[wpmccabe]

We have been gone from the ProStores fiasco fo just about a year now.

You will love Volusion!

NO MORE Empty Carts on Checkout!

[snapspeed]

Use Advanced Batch Converter for the photos, we are bringing over 8000+ images from ProStores and it is the only way to go. It resizes them and renames them and then you just ftp them to your photos folder. After the CSV import of your items they are ready to go because they are already renamed correctly. We do the 5 sizes for each item and it is way easier than VTG. Best $85 we ever spent on software.
We followed Wild Ocean Seafood guys over here from ProStores and have also never been happier.

[SteveK]

We left prostores March 2006 and there has been no looking back. It was definately in the top five for things we did to grow the business in the past several years.

We had only around 800 to 1000 products to move. If I recall, we did our transition much like snapspeed. Export/import a csv for product details and used a program (may have been infraview) to generate all the images in the correct sizes and batch rename. Then FTP.

I think the biggest manual chore we had were the child products which we were unable to upload with the correct associations.

[mac_island]

Hi Teresa,

The site is looking nice!

One other item is with importing customers, unless something has changed since April. ProStores uses an encrypted password for customer logins, so the options are to either import customer information with a generic password and then email them their password, asking them to change it (not the safest method). Or, get an email out to them letting them know you have a new website and that re-registration is required (not the most professional method).

We left PS mid-April of this year. I'm sure you'll be very happy with Volusion support and the granularity of administrative functions...and uptime. We still get email from ProStores apologizing for site unavailability(?). Not sure what took place last couple months over there, but it looked like we made the move just in time!

Good luck with your store Teresa.

mac