1. Executive Summary
In Romania’s fast-moving sneaker market, Sneaker Industry had built something rare: more than 11 years of trading history and a loyal, returning customer base. But the engine underneath the brand, an aging PrestaShop 1.7.1 store, had quietly become a liability rather than an asset. Roughly seven years without a safe update had left the platform fragile, expensive to host, and impossible to evolve.
As their agency partner, our mission was to move the brand off this legacy foundation and onto a modern, scalable platform, without losing the equity built over more than a decade. We executed a full replatforming to Shopify: migrating the product catalog, rebuilding the storefront, preserving hard-won SEO positions, and delivering a controlled go-live. This wasn’t a cosmetic redesign. It was the construction of a durable commercial foundation that the client’s own team can operate, extend, and grow.
2. Client Profile
Sneaker Industry is a specialist sneaker retailer that has operated in the Romanian market for over 11 years. Across that time, the brand earned a reputation built on product credibility and a dedicated community of repeat customers, the kind of trust that is difficult to buy and easy to lose during a platform transition.
The brand’s value proposition was strong. The technology serving it was not keeping pace. When they partnered with our agency, the priority was clear: give the brand a platform worthy of its catalog and its customers.
3. The Challenge: Escaping a Legacy Platform
The central challenge was a storefront that could no longer support growth. PrestaShop 1.7.1, heavily modified at the source-code level and unpatched for years, had reached the point where stability came at the cost of progress. Without a replatforming:
Growth was blocked. New features, integrations, and conversion optimizations couldn’t be implemented without risking functionality already in place.
Costs were high and unpredictable. Maintaining stability required expensive VPS hosting, on top of the recurring cost of failed or incompatible development work.
The store was exposed. Frequent DDoS attacks affected availability and undermined the performance of paid campaigns.
Modern tools were out of reach. Marketing and conversion tools repeatedly failed to integrate cleanly, leaving the brand unable to test or adopt new capabilities.
Talent was scarce. Skilled PrestaShop development resources are limited and costly in Romania, deepening the dependency on outside specialists.
Our task was to architect a transition that removed these risks entirely, moving to a fully managed SaaS platform that returns control to the brand’s own team.
4. Strategic Implementation
We followed a rigorous Statement of Work, sequenced so that each phase built cleanly on the last.
Phase I: Data Migration and Technical Foundation.
A replatforming is only as good as the catalog it carries across. We adopted a pragmatic fresh-start strategy, migrating exclusively the active product catalog: variants, attributes, images, HTML-formatted descriptions, prices, stock levels, and SKUs, together with the category structure, static pages, relevant blog content, and existing SEO configurations. Each import was QA-checked to confirm the data came across cleanly. Historical orders and customer records were deliberately not migrated, since they were already maintained in the client’s own system of record. This decision eliminated the cost of moving redundant data and freed budget for work that generates direct return. In parallel, we installed and configured the chosen premium Shopify theme (two options were presented to the client) around the full brand identity: color palette, typography, button styles, header, mega menu, footer, and cart.
Phase II: Store Architecture and Experience Design.
With the foundation in place, we built the complete shopping experience: main navigation, smart collections, and custom templates for the homepage, product page, collection page, and institutional pages such as About Us, each adapted for desktop and mobile. The experience layer was engineered for conversion, with advanced filtering and search via Shopify Search and Discovery, quick view, wishlist, product reviews, size charts, per-location stock availability, and a cart featuring a free-shipping progress bar. Policy and terms pages were created, and a cookie-consent framework including Google Consent Mode V2 and GDPR compliance was implemented via Pandectes, so the store was compliant from day one.
Phase III: SEO Preservation, Integrations, and Launch.
A migration that loses its search rankings is a migration that costs money. To protect organic traffic, we implemented 301 redirects across all active products and categories, plus the top 1,000 landing pages identified from Analytics and Search Console, then reconnected Google Search Console and submitted the sitemap. On the operational side, we integrated courier fulfilment through Xconnector with automatic AWB generation and tracking, configured payment methods including buy-now-pay-later via Mokka and PayPo, imported the brand’s active vouchers, and connected the email-marketing platform. Launch was handled as a controlled event: final internal QA in staging, a live screen-shared go-live with the client, sending-domain authentication (SPF, DKIM, DMARC), connection of the Google, YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram sales channels, and post-launch monitoring in the first hours.
5. Results
The point of the migration was not a new look. It was a foundation that protects what the brand had built and lets it move faster from here.
SEO equity preserved by design. Rather than gambling on organic traffic, we mapped 301 redirects across every active product and category plus the top 1,000 landing pages, then resubmitted the sitemap through Search Console. Search positions built over a decade were carried into the new store instead of being reset.
A launch with no downtime surprises. The go-live ran as a planned, screen-shared event with the client, followed by monitoring in the first hours.
Lower and more predictable running costs. The move from a heavily modified, self-hosted PrestaShop on VPS to a fully managed platform removed the recurring cost of patched-together fixes and specialist maintenance.
Operational independence. With hands-on training and tutorials handed over, the client’s internal team can now administer the store, launch features, and manage vouchers without waiting on scarce external developers.
Compliance and deliverability from day one. GDPR and Google Consent Mode V2 were live at launch, and sending-domain authentication (SPF, DKIM, DMARC) protected email deliverability from the first send.
6. Conclusion
Through this partnership, Sneaker Industry moved from a fragile legacy store into a modern, secure, and fully managed commercial platform. The risks that had defined the old setup, downtime under traffic spikes, security exposure, and dependency on scarce PrestaShop developers, are gone.
The brand’s internal team can now administer the store with far greater autonomy, test and launch new features quickly, and focus on what actually moves the business: marketing, sales, and customer experience. With a clean foundation in place, the store is positioned not just to operate, but to scale, and to support the brand’s planned rebranding in the seasons ahead.
Ready to move off a legacy platform?
If your store is stuck on aging technology that blocks growth and drains budget, we can map a migration that protects your traffic and hands control back to your team. Let’s talk.