We’re in the process of migrating a customer over to Shopify from their current ecom platform. Since this is an existing solution, we of course need to be able to redirect any incoming requests that matches an old product url to the corresponding Shopify product url. This is where we have run into a bit of a problem.
The current platform has two different markets (let’s call them A and B) and each of these markets have two different languages (X and Y). The current product urls therefore look something like this:
- https://a.company.com/x/an-old-product
- https://a.company.com/y/an-old-product
- https://b.company.com/x/an-old-product
- https://b.company.com/y/an-old-product
In Shopify we have set up two markets (A and B) each with two languages (X and Y) to match their current setup.
What we need to do now is to add url redirects as follows, in preparation for golive:
- https://a.company.com/x/an-old-product → https://a.company.com/x/products/a-new-shopify-product
- https://a.company.com/y/an-old-product → https://a.company.com/y/products/a-new-shopify-product
- https://b.company.com/x/an-old-product → https://b.company.com/x/products/a-new-shopify-product
- https://b.company.com/y/an-old-product → https://b.company.com/y/products/a-new-shopify-product
This seems like a super easy task, but apparently this is totally impossible to accomplish in Shopify as the host-part of the source url redirect (leaving only the path) is removed by Shopify when you add a new url redirect. Whyyy?!
This means that I am only able to register one of these redirects, for example:
… but the moment I try to register:
… Shopify will throw an error stating that “this path has already been taken” because of course it has since you’re removing the host-part of the source url!
How is this even a thing? Am I really expected to have to spin up a reverse proxy just to be able to handle simple url redirects (something that every other platform on earth is able to handle out of the box), or am missing something here?!