Migrating from PrestaShop to Magento: what is specific to PrestaShop

A PrestaShop shop moving to Magento is often looking for more flexibility for a growing catalogue, several shops or several countries. Both are open-source software built for e-commerce, but they organise neither products nor addresses the same way, and the PrestaShop database cannot be imported into Magento: the data goes through exports, a migration tool or a migration service.

This article covers what is specific to PrestaShop. What applies to any move to Magento (catalogue model, URL suffix, rewrites, extensions) is gathered in our page on migrating to Magento.

PrestaShop distinguishes attributes, which create combinations (a size and colour combination, with its own stock, reference and sometimes price impact), from features, which are descriptive (material, dimensions). In Magento both become attributes: those of the combinations are used to build a configurable product and its simple products, while features become descriptive attributes, filterable or not.

Points to check: the price impacts of combinations (Magento holds one price per simple product), the images attached to each combination, references and EAN codes, and PrestaShop packs, which become grouped products or bundles depending on how they are used.

By default, PrestaShop puts the numeric ID in its addresses: a category looks like /12-shoes, a product like /shoes/345-leather-sneaker.html, sometimes with the combination ID. Magento has no such IDs in its addresses, and IDs change at import anyway. No generic rule can therefore translate an old address into a new one: you need one redirect per URL, from each product and each category to its equivalent.

Also think of the addresses PrestaShop generates beyond the catalogue: CMS pages (/content/…), manufacturers and suppliers, search and filter result pages, and the addresses of each language if the shop is multilingual. Product images have their own addresses too, often indexed in Google Images: see our article on redirecting images.

PrestaShop's multistore and languages are spread in Magento across websites, stores and store views. Decide the mapping before the import: a PrestaShop language usually becomes a store view, with its own URL keys, and each language gets its own set of redirects. Prices per country, currencies and tax rules are set up again in Magento; they are not copied over.

Customer accounts are imported with their addresses, but passwords are stored in an encrypted form specific to PrestaShop that Magento cannot verify: plan for customers to set a new password, and let them know. Customer groups and their discounts are recreated. Order history goes through a migration tool or service; invoices already issued remain accounting records to be kept as they were issued.

Each PrestaShop module (payment, carriers, reviews, loyalty, blog) has to find its equivalent among Magento extensions, or be redeveloped. The rules common to any catalogue migration are in our article on e-commerce data migration.

Back up the PrestaShop shop (files and database) before any operation, then keep it available internally after the switchover: it is useful for checking an order or a product page. On the day, put it in maintenance mode while the latest orders and customers are migrated, point the domain to the Magento shop and activate the redirects. Redirects in Magento, and where to place them, are described in our article on redirects in Magento.

• Migrating to Magento: what changes, whatever the original platform
• From WooCommerce to Magento
• PrestaShop to Shopify, if Magento is not the only destination you are considering