Migrate from PrestaShop to Shopify
PrestaShop was the default choice for building an ecommerce store across southern Europe for years, and plenty of large stores still run on it. The platform itself is not the problem. What accumulates around it is: a server that needs maintaining, third-party payment modules that stop getting updates, and an admin panel that starts to stutter once the catalogue grows.
When a PrestaShop store comes to us for migration, the underlying reason is nearly always the same. They are paying for technical maintenance covering servers, modules and security patches instead of investing that time and money into selling.
You would not be the first to move
Brands including Brava Fabrics, TiendaCables and Callaghan have already migrated from PrestaShop to Shopify. It is not an unusual trend. It is what happens when a store grows and the cost of maintaining the infrastructure starts to outweigh what open source flexibility actually gives you.
What needs watching in a PrestaShop migration
- Product combinations. PrestaShop allows very free-form combinations, mixing size, colour and custom attributes at once. Shopify models them differently, so every product with complex combinations needs reviewing individually rather than in bulk.
- Multistore and multicurrency. If you run several PrestaShop stores from one back office, or sell in multiple currencies, you need to decide how that structure translates into Shopify Markets, domains and currency handling before a single product moves.
- SEO friendly URLs. PrestaShop gives you a lot of freedom over product and category URLs. That freedom is exactly what is hardest to preserve. Every old URL needs its 301 redirect to the new Shopify structure, and with a large catalogue that takes real time. It is still the only way to avoid losing organic traffic overnight.
- Customers and their history. As with any migration, passwords do not transfer directly because of how each platform hashes them. Order history does transfer, which is what keeps your segments and retention campaigns working.
How we approach it
First we audit which PrestaShop modules you genuinely use, not the ones installed by default that nobody touches. That tells us what needs replicating with Shopify apps and what can simply be dropped. We migrate catalogue, customers and orders into a staging environment, build the redirect map product by product and category by category, then review the result before touching production.
We treat your store like our own. If something does not add up during review, it does not go live until it does.
If you want to know what drives the cost or how long your case might take, get in touch and we will tell you what we find in your PrestaShop.