PrestaShop stores declined 13% year-over-year in Q1 2026, according to StoreLeads. The platform still powers roughly 165,000 stores — mostly in France, Spain, and North Africa — but the trend is clear. Merchants are leaving, and Shopify is where most of them land.

To migrate PrestaShop to Shopify, you need to export your product catalog, customers, and orders, transfer them using a migration app or CSV import, set up 301 redirects for every indexed URL, and restructure any products that exceed Shopify's variant limits. The whole process takes most stores a weekend for the initial transfer — plus 2–4 weeks of post-launch cleanup.

The migration itself isn't the hard part. The hard part is keeping your SEO intact, your customers able to log in, and your product data clean on the other side. This guide covers all of it — including the PrestaShop-specific gotchas that generic migration guides skip.

Back Up Everything Before You Touch Anything

Before you migrate PrestaShop to Shopify, export a full backup from your PrestaShop admin. Go to Advanced Parameters → Import/Export and download CSVs for products, categories, customers, and orders. Also grab a database backup through phpMyAdmin or your hosting panel.

Store these files somewhere outside your hosting account. If your host goes down or you accidentally break something mid-migration, you need a copy that doesn't depend on PrestaShop being online.

While you're at it, screenshot your PrestaShop theme settings, navigation structure, and any custom module configurations. You won't replicate them exactly on Shopify, but you'll want the reference when rebuilding.

How to Migrate PrestaShop to Shopify: Manual, CSV, or App

You have three options, and the right one depends on your catalog size.

Manual entry works if you have fewer than 50 products and simple variants. Copy product titles, descriptions, images, and prices into Shopify's admin by hand. It's tedious but gives you the most control over how data lands.

CSV import is the middle ground. Export products from PrestaShop as CSV, reformat columns to match Shopify's CSV template, then import through Settings → Import in Shopify. The catch: PrestaShop's CSV format doesn't map cleanly to Shopify's. You'll spend time renaming columns, reformatting variant data, and splitting combination fields.

Migration apps like LitExtension, Cart2Cart, or Prestify handle the heavy lifting for stores with hundreds or thousands of products. They connect directly to your PrestaShop database and transfer products, customers, categories, and orders into Shopify. Pricing typically starts around $29–$69 for small catalogs and scales up based on volume. Run the free demo migration first — every major tool offers one — to catch formatting issues before committing.

Handle the Variant Limit Before It Breaks Your Catalog

This is where PrestaShop merchants get burned. PrestaShop uses "combinations" — you can have dozens of attributes with hundreds of possible combinations per product. Shopify limits you to 3 option types (like Size, Color, Material) and a maximum of 100 variants per product. As of 2026, Shopify raised the cap to 2,000 variants for stores using the latest API, but the 3-option-type limit still applies.

Before migrating, audit your product catalog for items that exceed these limits. Common offenders:

Products with 4+ attribute groups (size, color, material, finish)
Configurable products with custom text fields or file uploads
Products using PrestaShop's "feature" fields for things Shopify handles with metafields

For products that exceed 3 option types, you'll need to restructure. Combine two attributes into one (e.g., "Blue / Cotton" as a single option value), split the product into multiple Shopify products, or use a product options app to extend beyond Shopify's native limits.

Map PrestaShop URLs to Shopify and Set Up 301 Redirects

This is the single most important step for SEO, and the one most merchants rush through.

PrestaShop's default URL structure looks like this: /summer-dresses/7-printed-chiffon-dress.html. The numeric ID and .html extension are baked in. Shopify's structure is completely different: /products/printed-chiffon-dress for products and /collections/summer-dresses for categories.

Shopify doesn't let you edit URL paths to match your old structure. The only option is 301 redirects — and you need one for every product, collection, and page that had organic traffic.

How to do it:

Export all your PrestaShop URLs. Use Screaming Frog or a sitemap export to get every indexed URL.
Create a spreadsheet mapping each old URL to its new Shopify URL.
In Shopify, go to Online Store → Navigation → URL Redirects and import the redirect CSV. For large catalogs, use a bulk redirect app.
After launch, run Screaming Frog against your new site to catch any 404s you missed.

Don't skip category pages. PrestaShop category URLs (like /12-summer-dresses) need redirects to Shopify collection URLs (like /collections/summer-dresses). These pages often carry more SEO authority than individual product pages.

What Happens to Customer Data During Migration?

Migration tools can transfer customer names, emails, addresses, and order history. What they can't transfer: passwords. PrestaShop and Shopify use different encryption methods, so there's no way to carry over login credentials.

Every customer will need to reset their password on first login. Plan for this:

Send an email before the migration explaining the platform change and that they'll need to set a new password
Use Shopify's bulk account invite feature after migration to trigger password reset emails
Add a clear "Reset Password" prompt on your new store's login page for the first few weeks

Order history is worth migrating even if customers don't log in often. It gives your support team context when handling returns or warranty claims, and it preserves lifetime value data for segmentation.

Rebuild What PrestaShop Modules Did With Shopify Apps

PrestaShop's module system and Shopify's app ecosystem solve similar problems differently. You won't find 1:1 replacements for every module, but Shopify's app store is significantly larger — over 10,000 apps versus PrestaShop's roughly 4,000 modules.

Common module-to-app mappings:

COD form modules → EasySell handles COD order forms with built-in phone verification and fraud prevention — a common need for PrestaShop merchants in MENA and South Asia who relied on custom COD modules
SEO modules → Shopify handles basic SEO natively; apps like SEO Manager or Smart SEO add advanced features
Multi-language modules → Shopify Markets or Langify for translation
Shipping modules → Shopify Shipping or carrier-specific apps
Analytics modules → Shopify's built-in analytics plus Google Analytics 4

Don't try to replicate your exact PrestaShop setup. Shopify handles many things natively that required a module on PrestaShop — abandoned cart emails, discount codes, basic SEO, and inventory management are all built in. If you're also evaluating other platforms, we've published similar guides for WooCommerce, Magento, and Wix.

Transfer SEO Metadata and Verify It Landed Correctly

Beyond URL redirects, you need to migrate your meta titles and descriptions. If you spent time optimizing these on PrestaShop, losing them means starting over in search rankings.

Migration apps usually transfer meta titles and descriptions automatically. If you're doing CSV imports, you'll need to add SEO Title and SEO Description columns to your Shopify product CSV.

After migration, spot-check at least 20–30 of your highest-traffic products:

Is the meta title intact and under 60 characters?
Is the meta description intact and under 160 characters?
Do image alt tags carry over? (They often don't — plan to re-add them.)
Are canonical URLs pointing correctly?

Submit your new sitemap to Google Search Console immediately after launching. Go to Online Store → Preferences in Shopify to find your sitemap URL, then submit it in Search Console under Sitemaps. For a full post-migration SEO walkthrough, see our Shopify SEO checklist.

Launch Day: The Checklist That Prevents Disasters

Don't switch your domain to Shopify until you've verified everything works. Use Shopify's free .myshopify.com URL for testing first.

Before pointing your domain:

Place 3–5 test orders covering different product types, payment methods, and shipping scenarios
Verify all 301 redirects are working (test at least 20 random old URLs)
Check that email notifications are sending correctly
Confirm payment gateway is processing live transactions
Test on mobile — if your customers are in MENA or South Asia, most of them shop on phones

After pointing your domain:

Monitor Google Search Console for crawl errors daily for the first two weeks
Watch for 404 spikes — they indicate missed redirects
Keep your PrestaShop store accessible (but not indexed) for at least 90 days as a fallback

The migration itself takes a weekend for most stores. The real work — fixing edge cases, rebuilding automations, and making sure SEO doesn't tank — plays out over the following 2–4 weeks. Start the process on a low-traffic day, have your redirect map ready before you touch the domain, and give yourself room to fix what breaks. Every platform migration has surprises. The merchants who plan for them are the ones whose traffic recovers in weeks instead of months.