When Fabrizio Spanu, an Italian web developer at Digital Fast Mind, took on the responsibility of migrating rugbysport.com from PrestaShop to Shopify, he knew it wasn’t a routine project.
The store was large, accumulated data over many years of operation, and was multilingual. Even more, it was a live site and had thousands of indexed URLs. With any disruption, its SEO performance and customer experience could be impacted.
For Fabrizio, this project wasn’t just about moving data; it was about rebuilding an entire ecosystem of product categories, pricing logic, orders, customers, translation, and SEO value on the new eCommerce platform. He needed an expert partner to help him.
Then, the story of Next-Card’s VIP Custom Migration service to help Fabrizio started and became one of the most intricate migrations we’ve ever handled. It was a journey through unusual data structures, tax inconsistencies, multilingual challenges, more than 1,200 URLs, and much more.
Yet the project ended in complete success and earned the most enthusiastic testimonial from Fabrizio: “Next-Cart: The Best Service Out There for Migrations! They are real people, not automated solutions, and will help and support over and over until you’re fully satisfied. Buy their support with no regrets—you won’t be disappointed!”
A high-risk migration with no room for error
As a developer, Fabrizio had executed numerous technical projects. But when it came to migrating a big site like rugbysport.com, it was different. Fabrizio was working on the existing PrestaShop store with:
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A multi-level product category architecture.
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Super-complex product information, with SKUs, EANs, features, metafields, and custom attributes.
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Multilingual content in English and Italian.
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Tax-included pricing to remain.
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Accumulated data of orders and customers over many years.
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A massive index footprint on Google.
While moving all of this to Shopify, we needed to preserve accuracy, SEO authority, and the website's live operation. So, it required more than a standard automated migration tool. Instead, the migration demanded a fully customized, hands-on approach.
Throughout Next-Cart’s Full VIP Custom Migration, Fabrizio worked directly with our technicians, Harry Dang and Michael Nguyen. Below is their detailed collaborative journey with constant communication of re-engineering, troubleshooting, and problem-solving.
The project background and main challenges
Over time, the PrestaShop store for Fabrizio’s client had become deeply customized in how it handled categories, pricing, attributes, and multilingual data. And Shopify’s simpler architecture could not accept these structures.
From the beginning, the Next-Cart team identified several high-risk challenges as follows:
1. A heavily nested category hierarchy - PrestaShop supported multiple levels; Shopify did not.
2. Complex product structures - Each product contained specific SKUs, EANs, custom features, variant metadata, and other fields. These fields didn’t directly map to Shopify.
3. Price and tax inconsistencies - PrestaShop displayed tax-included prices, while Shopify used tax-exclusive pricing by default.
4. Multilingual data - Both English and Italian needed to be migrated, without losing translations or breaking URLs.
5. Order and tax mismatches - Order totals, shipping costs, and tax lines had to be preserved correctly between the two different platforms.
6. Massive SEO redirect - More than 1.2k URLs had already been indexed, and a high risk of missed redirects and damaging rankings.
7. The store had to stay live during the migration - New orders and customers would keep coming in, but syncing new data wouldn’t overwrite what had already been migrated.
Fabrizio’s challenges were then Next-Cart’s to solve.
Deep dive into the problems and Next-Cart’s solutions
Most challenges came from small but critical incompatibilities between PrestaShop and Shopify. Let’s see how we approached each of them!
1. Multi-level categories were rebuilt for Shopify’s flat structure
On PrestaShop, the store relied on subcategories, for example: Maglie Rugby → Maglie Rugby Adulto / Maglie Rugby Bambino. On Shopify, meanwhile, only single-level collections are supported.
To resolve this difference, the Next-Cart team engineered a custom category-to-collection mapping logic using navigation menus and dropdowns. Then, each subcategory became an independent collection, fully linked and organized within the multi-level structure.
Finally, the UX was reconstructed to preserve the same intuitive hierarchy and browsing experience shoppers were familiar with.
2. Complex Product Data: SKUs, EANs, Features, Metafields
Many PrestaShop products contained rich attribute data that Shopify didn’t support directly. Therefore, during demo runs, Fabrizio noticed inconsistencies, such as missing SKUs and EANs.
Next-Cart created a custom workflow to migrate different fields between the two platforms. Specifically:
Automatically mapped EANs → Shopify barcode field.
Mapped product codes → Shopify SKU field.
Transferred PrestaShop “features” into Shopify metafields.
The custom migration tool, as a result, ensured no product data was lost, even for products with multiple attributes.
3. One of the hardest gaps to bridge - Tax-included pricing
PrestaShop displayed prices with tax included. Meanwhile, Shopify added taxes during checkout.
Fabrizio spotted this mismatch during a demo test when he saw a product priced at €26 on PrestaShop, but appeared as €21.31 in Shopify.
The Next-Cart team reviewed Shopify’s tax settings and confirmed that it did not allow manually entering the 22% VAT rate.
We decided to import tax-included prices directly into Shopify. Custom logic was created to recalculate and rewrite product prices during migration. The storefront then displayed the total amount customers expected to pay.
4. Multilingual migration and the Translation Lab challenge
The site used Italian as its primary language and also provided English versions for all product content. At the beginning, we integrated with the Shopify app, Translation Lab, to enable multi-language compatibility. Then we started importing all Italian and English content.
However, Shopify later deleted the English version during theme configuration. It was simply the platform’s limitation that it removed the secondary language when switching the primary one. As a result, the Italian translation entries disappeared.
However, we saw that despite the removals, the translations remained intact in Shopify’s system. We verified this when trying to re-import sample products and noticed that Translation Lab could reread them.
What the Next-Cart team did was to expand the import logic to align with Translation Lab, ensuring translations were not only imported but also recognized, indexed, and editable inside the Translation Lab interface. At the same time, we implemented troubleshooting solutions to allow the store to automatically recover all multiligue content without forcing Fabrizio to repeat full migrations.
5. Order totals, shipping costs, and tax mapping
Order data was especially complex when:
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PrestoShop processed taxes differently from Shopify.
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Shipping logic did not match Shopify’s structure.
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Historical orders contained multiple status combinations.
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Shopify displayed tax lines even when prices already included VAT.
During migration, Fabrizio noticed discrepancies between PrestaShop's totals and Shopify’s.
After receiving Fabrizio’s email, Harry and Michael immediately reviewed and fine-tuned the migration logic to recalculate shipping amounts correctly, hide tax lines when necessary, match PrestaShop's exact values, and map order statuses accurately.
The result? After iterative revisions and multiple test runs, the order data finally achieved complete accuracy.
6. Over 1,200 URLs requiring precise SEO redirects
Migrating over 1,200 URLs could result in 404 errors. This may be the highest-risk element for SEO. If this vast number of URLs had suddenly returned errors, Google rankings could have dropped in days.
In this situation, it was essential to build and execute a custom redirect importer. We referred to the PrestaShop database and the original website structure to customize the tool. Finally, Fabrizio had all Shopify redirects automatically generated and matched to their new equivalents.
When the redirect file was imported, Fabrizio confirmed that 404 issues decreased sharply. Over time, Google reindexed the new URLs without ranking loss.
7. Incremental migration and partial import for a store still staying live
While preparing the Shopify store, Fabrizio’s PrestaShop store remained fully operational. This meant that while we were configuring the theme or adjusting UX, new orders and customer registrations continued to flow in.
To avoid remigrating already moved data and overwriting it, we built partial migration logic. This allowed Fabrizio to import only new customers and orders since the previous migration.
Step by step, Fabrizio could keep testing the Shopify store while maintaining accurate stock and order records. He could switch the DNS only when he was fully ready.
The final partial migration was executed on February 16, right before launch.
Overview of the whole migration process, step by step
Fabrizio’s migration followed a rigorous workflow.
1. Pre-migration analysis
First and foremost, the Next-Cart team reviewed the entire PrestaShop website, including database structure, URL paths, tax settings, product attributes, and multilingual configurations. This analysis allowed us to map fields accurately and anticipate possible problems.
2. Develop custom workflows
Our technicians extended the migration tool to support tax-included pricing, metafields, hierarchical categories, and translation compatibility.
3. Multiple tests
Each test helped us identify mismatches between the two platforms, such as SKU placement, EAN mapping, price calculation errors, and order discrepancies. Then, we could optimize the migration tool. Our technicians repeated specific steps to ensure clean results.
4. Pre-launch validation
Right before launch, we imported only new PrestaShop orders and customers to ensure complete continuity.
5. Full migration execution and go live
After iterative test runs were validated, our team performed the first migration of products, collections, customers, and orders.
Once DNS was updated, we verified SEO redirects, storefront behavior, pricing, and the integrity of imported data.
By the time the store switched to Shopify, we made sure everything worked smoothly.
The result: A fully functional, accurate, SEO-safe Shopify store
The PrestaShop-Shopify migration process concluded successfully.
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All products, variants, categories, customers, orders, metafields, EANs, SKUs, and multilingual content were migrated correctly.
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Perfectly preserved category structure, remaining the browsing experience intuitive and coherent.
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Exactly displayed the tax-including pricing as the original store.
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All URLs redirected correctly, and Google reindexed the new site without penalties.
The Shopify store was fully operational without downtime. Fabrizio received attentive support, even after launch. He left a great feedback: “They will help and support over and over until you're fully satisfied. You won’t be disappointed.”
Final Thoughts: Real humans, real support
The migration project from Fabrizio wasn’t easy. It came with unpredictable platform limitations, pricing/tax complexities, deleted translations, SEO risks, and more.
But one element stayed consistent throughout the journey: the partnership between Fabrizio and the Next-Cart team.
Every question received a timely and supportive answer.
Every issue was investigated.
Every solution was optimized to match expectations.
This case study highlights what sets Next-Cart apart: not just technical capability, we provide real humans, real support, and real commitment. Our specialists communicate, think creatively, and always stand by customers until the job is truly complete.
Are you a developer like Fabrizio or a merchant running your eCommerce store? Next-Cart can help you migrate safely, no matter how complex your project is.
