Order Migration Overview

This section covers in-depth information on best practices related specifically to migrating orders. It assumes you have already migrated Products and Customers, but not B2B information (if applicable). Some features have been omitted, usually because they are read-only, to limit the scope and complexity of this guide.

Contents of this guide

The following sections provide the relevant information for migrating orders:

• Complexity Considerations - factors to consider in preparing your data and how best to handle the individual aspects of migrating order information
• Prepare Data - relevant structures and data for how to handle orders during the migration phase
• Migration Phase - basic structure of migration process including some measure of time complexity and the order-specific steps relevant to the migration process

Special considerations

Because order data often contains customer information, it is important to handle your data with care. If you or your customers are in a region affected by the GDPR, be sure to take privacy into account when migrating order data. Generally, it is enough to anonymize only that data that has been specifically requested, but you may want or need to do more.

In addition to privacy concerns, BigCommerce billing is based on total orders and trailing order value. In order to prevent billing errors, there is a field in the order creation process that must have the appropriate flag set. Specifically, the field external_source should have the value M-MIG when creating the order, or it will be included in the billing data, which will cause a potential billing mismatch.

If you have not configured shipping options or payment options, you can add orders without this information, but it may cause some issues with record-keeping if that data is skipped during migration. As such, you should consider configuring both your shipping and payments information ahead of order migration.

Unlike with product migration, only one endpoint should be necessary for initial order migration, although other endpoints may become relevant in delta migration if necessary. Both endpoints are outlined in the Orders API Reference.

FAQs

Additional resources

• Orders API Reference
• GDPR and BigCommerce
• Shipping Setup
• Available Payment Gateways
• API Best Practices
• Data Migration Services