Most efficient way to populate customer's country field

Question

Magento CE 1.9.2.1

Our store was recently migrated from Volusion to Magento. For customers in the United States, Volusion would store their country information as "US" however Magento refuses to recognize it because it doesn't store this data as "United States" in the database. This has resulted in a number of errors; the predominant one being USPS shipping method erroring out when it attempts to process a registered customer's address.

For customers who have "US" in there country field, it appears as if they don't have a country at all in the account section or in Magento's customer management area.

I need an efficient way to bulk update these customers with incorrect country data. I attempted to do this with the Import/Export option in Magento (not Data Profiles) and it seems to have never finished. I left it on for hours and it continued to say "Please Wait". I also looked into Magmi but it seems they don't have a customer plugin for importing/exporting.

What is the best way to bulk update customer addresses in Magento CE 1.9.2.1? Thank you.

Answer 1

I'd do it directly in the database. The information is stored in the database table customer_address_entity_varchar, you can get the matching attribute_id from the table eav_attribute in the line with attribute_code = 'country_id'. The value should be US. The exact query depends on your attribute_id for the country_code and on what the current value is for those entries.