Setting up ecommerce sites

When developing a new site, for anyone you will generally have test and/or development version of a site. These sites are usually exact copies the live site, and from time to time you will copy the live database to these sites.
Usually when doing this you will go through the site and change some of the configuration values, like the gmap api number, and others like the path to payment gateways and credit card gateway indentification numbers to point to test versions of the payment gateways.
(Taken from heydon consulting might prove useful in the future)
Generally doing this by hand you will miss some parameters, and have it really cause problems later. But there is an answer that will allow you to set these values automatically so that depending on the site, will be rewritten correctly everytime.
In the sites directory you will have a directory for each site, and a settings.php file in each of these directories. Just add to your test file the following
$conf = array(
'site_mail' => 'test@example.com.au',
'ccard_clientid' => 'example_no',
'ccard_url' => 'https://test.example.com/store/payment/ccard',
'googlemap_api_key' => 'ABQIAAAAhfBLLoKUHq7LqQ2QBcWQ2hRCSo_fHprJOtfmhc0LOWj7Ebi-6BSINRQq0Kie8sAsQKjO1tEi-ZFxSw',
);
?>

This will override these values above and will mean that you will never need to change them again.
Also to speed up the download and update of your local database quickly and if you have a ssh connection to your webserver, try the following.
ssh webuser@example.com mysqldump -udbuser -pdbpasswd drupaldb | mysql -ulocaldbuser -pdbpasswd localdrupaldb
If you put this into a small shell script it is just a simple command away.