Transferring / Migrating an entire Catalog in Magento

Question

I've been trying to transfer the entire catalog from one Magento server to another and I've been experiencing some significant problems.

I can get most of the catalog data across, but I always end up missing something like product swatches, product categories or a product's custom options. To get these across I then end up building my own scripts that queries Magento, writes the data to a CSV file of my own design, and then write another script that will add this data to the other server.

Ive been asking the other developers in house, and apparently this is how they do every migration. They spend ages building lots of custom scripts just to transfer the catalog across, and apparently the different Magento sites are so different they have to build entirely new scripts when they transfer the next site.

Is this a common experience for everybody?

I feel like there must be a better way. Does anybody know of a better way to transfer the entire catalog (not just the products, but everything) to another server? Can we not just copy across the entire SQL Database?

Answer 1

You can export the products using Magento export wizard by going into System -> import/export ->export Then from export settings select Entity type Products and Export File Format as CSV

After getting the CSV file you can import the whole catalog using the Magento same wizard or You can use data flow.

The other option around to import bigger catalogs in Magento is to Use Magmi.

http://wiki.magmi.org/index.php?title=Magmi_Wiki

I hope this will help

Answer 2

There are many ways you can migrate your magento store from one server to another.

If you want to transfer complete magento site, then you should try with database import/export. Its easy and fast process. You can follow Site Ground tutorial for this

If you want to transfer only data such as product, catalog, customers, orders etc, then you can try magmi importer its easy and fast for importing data. Also you can try magento data flow profiles as well.