Personalized Gift Store: From PrestaShop to Shopify

Based in France, our client creates personalized gifts that shoppers can customize with names and messages for special occasions such as birthdays and weddings. For this reason, personalization sits at the heart of their shopping experience.

Gradually, the client’s PrestaShop store came to rely on several third-party modules, including one for product personalization and another for the blog. Keeping these modules updated and working together became harder to maintain, so the client decided to move to Shopify for a simpler, more stable setup. However, they could not afford to lose their blog content or SEO in the move, and VAT-inclusive pricing also had to work on Shopify from day one.

Because much of their data lived in custom modules, a standard field-to-field transfer would not be enough. The client turned to LitExtension to handle that module-based data and adapt it to Shopify’s structure.

The client set out the following requirements to make the move work for their store:

• Transfer all store data and CMS pages from PrestaShop to Shopify, keeping product prices inclusive of 20% VAT.
• Consolidate articles from a third-party blog module into one Shopify blog, without recreating the original blog categories.
• Preserve each article’s content and SEO metadata, including its original publication date, and redirect the old article URLs.
• Separate genuine catalog products from NDK personalization records.
• Convert product categories into tag-based automated collections.
• Limit the final Recent Data Migration to customers and orders, preserving catalog edits already made on Shopify.

The blog was the first sticking point. The client’s articles were stored in a third-party module rather than PrestaShop’s standard CMS, so they sat outside the usual migration fields. In addition, the client wanted all of these articles consolidated into one Shopify blog, with their content and article data kept intact.

Personalization data created a different kind of problem. The store used NDK, a PrestaShop module for product customization, which kept customization-related records alongside real products. Therefore, these entries had to be separated from genuine catalog items, so they would not become standalone Shopify products or reappear during later updates.

The catalog itself also needed restructuring. Because Shopify’s automated collections add products based on rules such as product tags, PrestaShop’s direct product-to-category links could not be copied as they were. On top of that, some categories shared the same name under different parent categories, which could easily mix up product assignments.

First, our team moved the client’s store data and CMS pages to Shopify, keeping every product price inclusive of 20% VAT.

The blog came next, and we moved all 21 articles from the third-party module into a single Shopify blog, giving the client the simpler structure they wanted. We also supported 301 redirects from the existing PrestaShop article URLs, so readers and search engines could still reach every post.

For the personalization data, we worked with the client to exclude the identified non-product records and clarify how NDK-related entries would be handled. As a result, only genuine, sellable products appeared in the Shopify catalog.

On the catalog side, we set up tag-based collection mapping, using product tags and collection conditions to place each product in the right automated collection. Where category names overlapped, we added the parent category name to tell the migrated collections apart.

Shortly before launch, we ran a Recent Data Migration with product migration disabled, transferring only the latest customers and orders. This preserved the catalog edits the client had already made on Shopify. Soon after, our client confirmed the migration was complete and their Shopify store was live.