Migrating PrestaShop to Shopify With a Domain Change Without Starting From Scratch

There's one scenario I see way too often and it drives me nuts. An eCom merchant migrates from PrestaShop to Shopify, swaps their domain name in the process, and ends up with a broken site for almost a year. eCom share of revenue drops from 10% to 2-3%. Traffic tanks. And nobody knows where the leak is coming from.

I'm going to walk you through a real case, because it's more useful than a generic checklist anyone could have written. A multi-brand ready-to-wear shop, 4 physical stores, that did everything at once. Migration, domain change, new ERP. The perfect combo to send everything off the rails.

The starting point, a PrestaShop history dragging on since 2012

The shop had launched its first eShop back in 2012-2013, on PrestaShop, managed in-house. Not many products, but a monstrous amount of time on each listing because back then we didn't have the tools we have now. You hand-cranked everything.

They redesigned 4-5 years ago, hired a full-time web manager, 35 hours a week. And at that point, the bottleneck wasn't technical. Well, not only. The online catalog only covered 40% of the in-store catalog. The cause was product images. Not all suppliers could provide the visuals. They tried in-house white-background shoots, dropped after one season because it was too much work. Kept only for the nice, high-value pieces.

I say it all the time, in eCommerce you don't buy a product, you buy the photo. When 60% of your catalog is invisible online for lack of visuals, Shopify fixes none of that. The real blocker is that you don't have visuals. It's a content problem, and switching platforms doesn't solve it.

Meanwhile, the legacy POS software was hard-coded, with non-automated syncs. Customer and sales sync in the evening, manual imports and exports during the day. Obsolete. So the logical call, move to a modern SaaS ERP.

The trap, an ERP that works with Shopify, but only from a blank shell

A year ago, they migrated to a SaaS ERP / POS (from the creator of FastMag), plus opened a 4th, more premium store, 580 m². So far so good.

Except the ERP was supposed to work with Shopify. And it did work with Shopify. But only from a blank shell. Pulling in the history of items already live on Shopify, mission impossible. Undoable.

You can see the problem coming. They had to rebuild a Shopify from scratch and migrate the PrestaShop onto it, while the ERP imposed its own logic. Nobody had anticipated this when they chose the POS tool.

This is exactly the kind of thing you have to check BEFORE you sign anything. When you pick an ERP or POS that's going to drive your stock and your site, the question to ask is, does this work with MY existing Shopify, with my history, or does it force me to start from a blank shell. That's what decides whether you start from scratch or not.

Changing the domain at the same time, the trap that really kills

And as if that wasn't enough, in parallel, a domain name change. From cloane-sport.com to cloane.fr. The logic behind it was sound, the new domain reflects the connection to all the stores rather than a single "sport" shop. On principle, I fully agree.

On timing, that's where it falls apart.

You're stacking three breaks at once. New platform, new ERP back office, new domain. Each project taken on its own is manageable. All three together, that's how you end up with a broken site for almost a year and an eCom share cut by 4.

When you move from PrestaShop to Shopify, you have to rework all the tags, the entire structure, because it works nothing alike. That means cleanup and restructuring, no way around it. If on top of that you change the domain the same day, you've got zero reference point to diagnose what's breaking. Traffic drops, and you can't tell whether it's the domain, the redirects, or the redesign. You're lost.

The rule I keep repeating at the agency

A domain change happens on its own. Never glued to a platform migration.

The order I recommend:

• First you migrate PrestaShop to Shopify while keeping your current domain. You stabilize, you check that traffic holds, that conversions follow.
• Once it's clean and running, you switch the domain, with a rock-solid redirect plan.

That way, if something drops after the domain change, you know it came from the domain. Not ten things mixed together.

Preserving what matters, and recovering what looks lost

When you migrate, two things really kill you: botched redirects and losing your history. The product page, you can always manage.

301 redirects are non-negotiable

Every old PrestaShop URL must point to the right Shopify URL. Products, categories, pages. You do your full mapping before the switch, you test it on a staging store, and you verify nothing returns a 404. When it's done right, you might lose 5% at first and it bounces back immediately. When it's done wrong, you lose half your traffic and it takes months to climb back.

With a domain change on top, the mapping doubles. Old domain + old URL to new domain + new URL. Which is exactly why you don't do everything the same day.

Your history, you don't necessarily have to lose it

For the shop I'm talking about, the legacy front end is recoverable via the Wayback Machine. You find what your pages looked like, you can rebuild your structure, recover URLs you'd forgotten.

And sales history, you pull it out as an Excel export and reprocess it. The history of your orders and customers isn't glamorous but it's precious for your CRM and your retention segments. Having that clean history is what lets you then avoid paying for an ad to re-acquire a customer you'd already sold to.

For the technical switch, exporting products, orders and customers from PrestaShop works great via Matrixify, which pulls everything in bulk and reimports it into Shopify. I've done plenty of migrations this way to recover the full history.

Test in hiding before you open the gates

Too many people skip a step, testing in a hidden environment without search engines indexing your staging.

You set up your staging Shopify, you put it behind password protect, and you test everything on it. Redirects, listings, checkout, payments, shipping. You validate that everything works. Only then do you open to the public.

If you leave your staging indexable, you create duplicate content and blur everything. Password protect is the baseline. You start there.

And honestly, keep a small budget for this setup and data transfer part. I see a lot of agencies billing you for dev and design but not supporting you at all on data transfer, store configuration, redirects. And that's often what makes the difference between a migration that holds and one that crashes. Better to keep an envelope for this than pour everything into dev and design.

What the new stack unlocked, to end on the positive

Because the story ends well. Once the new ERP + Shopify stack was in place, stock is now unified across the 4 points of sale.

Before, only one store's stock showed on the site. And when you transferred merchandise from one location to another, the item straight up disappeared from the site. A nightmare.

Now, on a product page, you can see which store has stock available for pickup. And they're seeing deliveries in neighboring departments, people ordering online and coming to collect in store. The web drives foot traffic and vice versa. That's the whole point of unified stock.

Online traffic works like in-store traffic. When your stock is accurate and the customer can see where to pick up their product, your site becomes an engine for store visits.

What I take away

If you have to migrate from PrestaShop to Shopify with a domain change, trap number one: doing it all at once. If it crashes, you want to be able to pinpoint the cause right away.

The order to follow:

1. Check that your ERP or POS accepts your existing Shopify, not just a blank shell. Do this before you sign.
2. Migrate PrestaShop to Shopify while keeping your current domain. Matrixify for the data, 301 redirects tested on a password-protected staging.
3. Stabilize, monitor traffic for a few weeks.
4. Once it's clean, switch the domain with its own redirect plan.
5. Recover all the history you can, Wayback Machine for the front end, Excel exports for sales.

A year of a broken site and an eCom share cut by 4, it's almost always a question of sequencing, not technique. If you want to scope your migration before diving in, this is the kind of project we take on through the Shopify and conversion side for fashion brands.