Can I migrate from PrestaShop to Shopify?

Here is what actually happens and what stays on your plate.

What moves and what doesn’t

PrestaShop and Shopify store things differently, so a migration is a translation, not a copy.

Products move with their names, descriptions, prices, SKUs, images and combinations. PrestaShop combinations become Shopify variants. Categories can become collections in Shopify, and manufacturers can become collections too.

Customers and orders move as historical records, so you can still look up what someone bought in 2023.

CMS pages are the messy one. A PrestaShop CMS page often leans on your theme or on a module to look right. The text and images come over, but the layout usually needs a once-over in Shopify.

Things that do not move: your theme, your PrestaShop modules, your payment gateway configuration, your tax rules and your shipping rules. Shopify has its own versions of all of these and you set them up fresh. Shopify also has no direct equivalent for some PrestaShop concepts, so fields such as attributes or features need somewhere to live. That is usually a metafield plus a small theme change.

If your PrestaShop store uses a custom module that creates its own product type, those products are not part of a standard migration.

How much does it cost?

Short version: the import tool is rarely the biggest line. Shopify’s own subscription, a theme and the apps that replace your old modules add up to more than the migration itself, and your own hours are the line nobody budgets for. See the current PrestaShop Importer pricing for the import itself.

Our guide to Shopify migration costs covers WooCommerce and PrestaShop, including the data transfer, storefront setup, help you can hire and ongoing bills.

On speed, rough figure from our own runs: in about two hours you can download and upload a few thousand products, customers and orders. Bigger catalogues take longer and a lot depends on how fast your PrestaShop server answers.

Will I lose my Google rankings?

Not if you set up redirects. Your PrestaShop product URLs and category URLs will change on Shopify, and a URL that returns a 404 loses whatever ranking it had. A redirect tells Google the page moved, and the ranking follows.

Our PrestaShop Importer can create those redirects for products and collections while it imports. If you migrate a different way, you build the redirect list yourself, and Shopify accepts a CSV of them.

Rankings usually wobble for a few weeks after any replatform even when the redirects are right. Plan the move for a quiet period, not the week before your busiest season.

What to check before you call it done

Open ten products and compare them against the live PrestaShop pages, including one with many combinations and one with a long description full of images. Check that stock numbers match. Place a test order and confirm the confirmation email, the tax and the shipping rate all look right. Search your own site for a product you know exists. Check a handful of your top-traffic old URLs and confirm each one lands somewhere sensible.

Keep PrestaShop running until you have done all of that. There is no prize for switching the DNS early.

A realistic plan

Set up a Shopify trial, run a demo and see what your data actually looks like in Shopify. That one step answers more questions than any article can, including this one. Once you are happy, do the full import, then build the theme around real products instead of placeholders.

If you would rather not run it yourself, our $299 expert migration covers the whole import: we set up the webservice key, run it, verify the result and add theme metafields where they are needed so your PrestaShop attributes show on the Shopify product page. It is not a data cleanup service, so if your PrestaShop data is inconsistent it will still be inconsistent afterwards.

You can try the PrestaShop Importer free up to 100 products and see your own data in Shopify before you decide anything.