Attempting to merge a different shopping cart with Magento

Question

I have an ambitious goal of merging about 1000 orders from a custom, shopping cart solution (not Magento) that we used before my company switched to Magento. This is for the sake of customer service reps who are having to bounce back and forth between two systems to find an order but it would also help with reporting. The plan was to create an additional column in Magento's order grid that represented the previous shopping cart's order number as Magento uses a different numbering system.

I see sales_flat_order and sales_flat_order_grid contain a large amount of order data. I attempted at first just to populate these two tables, create sequential entity_ids and increment_ids (order number) but my orders didn't show.

Question: What is the minimum number of tables that must be populated in order for Magento to show orders on the order grid? I may not necessarily have shipping information or customer information however I can populate those additional tables if necessary.

Answer 1

You should at least look at quote tables, which is related to quote items etc. Maybe better approach would be to use the API magento provides and place those orders? Mark them shipped where required. Use an offline payment method to be able to easily invoice them?

Answer 2

Take a look at Clearing Magento after testing (sales related section).

It would be virtually impossible to recreate these orders from the db

A better approach would be

• Use the API - Module: Shopping Cart API
• Programmatically create order in Magento

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