E-commerce data migration: products, customers and orders in a redesign

An e-commerce redesign, especially one that changes platform (from PrestaShop to Magento or Shopify, from Shopify to WooCommerce), moves far more than pages: a catalogue, customer accounts, years of orders, and the URLs that bring shoppers in from Google. One lost piece of data means a product nobody can find, a customer who can no longer log in, or an invoice that can no longer be traced.

This article covers what is specific to e-commerce. The general method (inventory, format mapping, trial migration, checks, final migration) is in our article on data migration in a redesign. The shop's pages and articles (guides, blog, corporate pages) are covered by our article on migrating editorial content.

Products are the most structured and demanding data: variants (size, colour), attributes and features, categories, prices and pricing rules, stock, images, related products. Each platform models them its own way: a PrestaShop combination does not always map to a Shopify variant, whose number per product is limited. The mapping table must settle these cases before the first migration, not during it.

Migrate what sells too: descriptions, category text, customer reviews, and image alt text, which matters for Google Images.

Customer accounts are migrated with their addresses and consents (newsletter, accepted terms). Two points need a decision:

• passwords: they are stored in a hashed form specific to each platform, rarely readable by the new one. Most often, customers have to set a new password at their first login; warn them and prepare a clear email;
• personal data: only migrate what is still useful, and use the migration to apply your retention periods.

Order history lets customers find their purchases and lets customer service answer them. Invoices are accounting records: their numbering must stay continuous, and the old system often has to remain available to retrieve them as they were issued. Also check the data around them: discount codes, credit notes, gift cards, loyalty programmes.

An online shop exchanges data with an ERP, a PIM, a CRM, carriers, marketplaces or a Google Merchant Center feed. Each feed must be reconnected and tested on staging: product identifiers, SKUs, VAT codes. A product reference that changes can break a feed without the site itself showing a single error.

Product pages and categories carry most of the traffic from Google. Each platform enforces its own URL rules (/products/ and /collections/ prefixes on Shopify, IDs in the address on PrestaShop): addresses almost always change, and every old URL must be 301-redirected to its exact equivalent. A product removed from the catalogue is redirected to its category or a replacement product if there is one, otherwise it returns 410; filter and sort pages are handled separately.

This is the work Swan automates: it crawls the old site and staging, matches pages by their content, and lets you validate the doubtful cases. See our articles on migrating from PrestaShop to Shopify, from PrestaShop to Magento and from Shopify to WooCommerce. The SEO steps specific to an online shop are covered in our article on migrating an e-commerce website.

Three approaches, often combined: the platforms' CSV exports and imports, enough for a simple catalogue; APIs, safer for large volumes because they check data consistency on write; specialised migration services (Cart2Cart, LitExtension), which know both platforms but need checks as rigorous as an in-house migration.

Between the trial run and switchover, the shop keeps selling: new customers sign up, orders are placed. Plan a delta migration of this data at go-live, during a quiet time slot, and check counts and amounts before opening the new shop.