Contents
Migrating a catalogue of 440 PrestaShop categories to Shopify without losing years of accumulated organic traffic is the kind of project where a structural mistake gets expensive fast. Here is how it went on a furniture and home decor e-commerce site.
The starting point
The site had been running on PrestaShop for a long time, with a catalogue that ran deep: 440 categories organised across several levels of hierarchy, dozens of suppliers, and order flows specific to each partner. Maintenance was becoming time-consuming, the CMS demanded constant security vigilance, and the hosting was showing its limits against the size of the catalogue.
The goal: move to Shopify for admin and checkout, with a custom Hydrogen storefront to preserve the depth of the furniture catalogue, without losing any of the existing search rankings.
The main constraint: category hierarchy
PrestaShop and Shopify don’t model categories the same way. PrestaShop handles a deep native tree structure. Shopify works through collections, which are flatter by default. Faithfully reproducing 440 categories with their parent/child relationships required an extra layer.
The solution: a metafield system with a collection_reference type, allowing each Shopify collection to reconstruct its parent position in the original tree. Every collection knows its exact place in the original hierarchy, which makes it possible to reproduce breadcrumbs and navigation identically, two elements that are critical for the SEO of a deep catalogue.
The architecture put in place
The project wasn’t limited to the storefront. A custom ERP was built to handle what Shopify doesn’t cover natively in a multi-supplier context:
A Supabase database structured around several key tables: suppliers, product variants, supplier catalogue imports, Shopify sync queue, orders.
Event-driven sync rather than cron-based. Instead of a scheduled job running every X minutes, the architecture relies on a sync queue triggered by events through Next.js Server Actions. A change on the supplier side immediately triggers an update on the Shopify side, without waiting for the next cron run.
About twenty suppliers integrated with their own order templates and flow specifics, each with its own formatting rules and import frequency.
n8n automation to orchestrate recurring tasks across the different systems (catalogue import, stock alerts, supplier follow-ups).
The SEO migration, item by item
With 440 categories, the smallest approximation in the redirect plan can wipe out a whole segment of organic traffic. The method followed:
- Full export of the PrestaShop tree with all associated metadata (title, description, URL, position in the tree).
- Systematic mapping of every PrestaShop category to its matching Shopify collection, keeping the URL slug wherever possible.
- A 301 redirect plan for URLs that couldn’t be kept identical.
- Rebuilding hierarchy metafields so that navigation and breadcrumbs reflect the old structure exactly.
- Manual verification of high-traffic categories before the switchover, as a priority.
What was preserved
In the end, the collection hierarchy and metafields were fully preserved for a particularly rich furniture catalogue, with ERP sync running in real time rather than in batches.
The takeaway
A PrestaShop to Shopify replatform is never a simple export/import. The real complexity lies in modelling the catalogue hierarchy and rebuilding supplier flows that, on PrestaShop, were often handled manually or through specific modules with no Shopify equivalent. That modelling work is what determines whether SEO survives the migration or not.
If your catalogue is in this situation, the CMS to Shopify migration path details how the structure audit and hierarchy rebuild are handled before any switchover.