Case Study: Migrating a 1,630-Product Shoe Retailer from PrestaShop to Shopify

Client: A leading Spanish footwear retailer
Project: Full PrestaShop 1.7 → Shopify Migration & Live Sync Infrastructure
Role: Lead Developer & Migration Architect

The Challenge

A well-established Spanish footwear retailer came to me with a mature PrestaShop 1.7 store — 1,630 products, nearly 10,000 variants, 95,000 real customers, and deep marketplace integrations. They needed to move to Shopify without losing a single order, breaking a single URL, or disrupting their daily operations.

The stakes were high. PrestaShop stores prices tax-exclusive while Shopify expects tax-inclusive pricing — a subtle difference that, if mishandled, means every price on the new store is wrong. Their customer database was contaminated with over 41,000 marketplace proxy accounts (fulfillment bots, automated alerts) that had to be identified and purged. And their catalog structure — 134 nested categories with localized handles — needed to map cleanly to Shopify's collection system without breaking SEO.

This wasn't a CSV upload. This was surgery.

My Solution

Custom Migration Engine

I built a purpose-built Node.js migration toolkit — 18 specialized scripts, each handling one domain of the migration with full error recovery and audit trails.

  • Product migration with tax-correct pricing: every variant price computed from source tax-exclusive prices with VAT and active discounts applied, sourced directly from PrestaShop's specific_prices API with date-range validation
  • Image pipeline that parsed PrestaShop's XML-based image API (not JSON — a quirk that breaks most migration tools) and transferred every product image with correct ordering
  • Customer migration via Shopify's bulk operations API, processing 136,000 records with intelligent filtering that identified and excluded 41,000 marketplace bot accounts by email domain pattern matching and name heuristics
  • Smart collection architecture: 134 collections rebuilt as automated smart collections using tag-based rules, replacing manual category assignments with a handle-based tagging strategy that auto-populates as new products arrive

URL Redirect Infrastructure

43,322 URL redirects imported via Shopify's bulk operations API — preserving every indexed URL from the old store. No SEO authority left behind.

Live Sync System

The migration wasn't the end — it was the foundation. I built a continuous sync layer so both platforms could coexist during the transition:

  • Stock sync (PrestaShop → Shopify): scheduled polling every 15 minutes via n8n. The initial webhook-based approach burned through all automation executions overnight — marketplace activity and cron jobs generated hundreds of stock-change events per night. I redesigned it as a scheduled poll at ~96 executions/day, a 95%+ reduction in overhead.
  • New product sync: automatic detection and creation of new products in Shopify, including tag assignment for smart collection placement
  • Customer sync: incremental polling with persistent state tracking — new customers flow to Shopify continuously
  • Order sync: bidirectional awareness so fulfillment stays coordinated

Verification & Audit

Every phase was verified. I built audit scripts that cross-referenced source and destination data:

  • Price verification across all 1,630 products against source data — 100% match rate
  • Image sampling verification — spot-checked across the catalog
  • SKU-to-inventory mapping coherence checks
  • Collection population audits

The Results

  • 1,630 products migrated with 9,821 variants — zero data loss
  • 95,000 real customers imported (41,000 bot accounts filtered out)
  • 134 smart collections auto-populated via tag rules
  • 43,322 URL redirects preserving full SEO equity
  • 100% price accuracy — verified against source data
  • ~96 sync executions/day — down from hundreds per hour after webhook redesign
  • Zero downtime — both platforms ran in parallel throughout

The Impact

The client moved from an aging PrestaShop installation to a modern Shopify storefront without disrupting their daily operations or marketplace integrations. The smart collection architecture means their catalog organizes itself as new products are added. The sync infrastructure gave them a safe, gradual transition period instead of a risky hard cutover.

Most importantly, the tax-correct pricing migration — the kind of detail that generic migration apps get wrong — meant they launched with accurate prices from day one. No panicked post-launch fixes. No customer complaints about wrong prices.

Skills Utilized

Shopify GraphQL Admin API · PrestaShop 1.7 API · Node.js · Bulk Operations · n8n Workflow Automation · Data Migration Architecture · SEO Redirect Strategy · Tax-Inclusive Price Computation · Smart Collection Design · Customer Data Cleansing

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