The product arrived, but its customers cannot find it
A migrated product appears in the new catalogue with the correct price, stock and imagery. The old link in an email campaign opens a missing page. From the catalogue team's perspective, the move succeeded. From the customer's perspective, the product disappeared. A migration is incomplete when it moves records but abandons the routes people use to reach them.
URLs are part of a shop's operational history. They live in saved messages, supplier materials, customer bookmarks and external articles. Some matter even when they have little recent traffic, because the associated product is seasonal or purchased infrequently. A fresh navigation tree cannot replace those entry points.
Build the destination map before the redirect rules
Start with an inventory of public paths and classify their intended outcome: retained, moved, consolidated or deliberately removed. Include product variants, collections, editorial pages and language paths. The mapping should express a content decision before it becomes a server configuration.
Google recommends mapping old URLs to their new destinations and using permanent server redirects for moves. It also warns against sending unrelated old pages to a generic destination. The official migration guide explains these principles.
For an illustrative catalogue consolidation, a discontinued product might have a genuine successor or might not. A relevant replacement can deserve a redirect. An unrelated bestseller does not become a suitable destination merely because the commercial team wants to keep the visit. A useful unavailable-product page may serve the customer better.
Check what the destination actually promises
A path match is not enough. The destination must refer to the intended product, language and buying context. A German product link that lands on an English category page may pass an automated reachability check while failing the customer task.
Review variant selection and campaign parameters deliberately. Some parameters select meaningful product options; others record attribution. Decide which must survive the move and which are obsolete. An indiscriminate rule that discards every query string can remove the buyer's selected configuration. Preserving every parameter can retain accidental or unwanted behaviour.
Links inside transactional messages deserve a separate review. Order history, account access and return requests may use different routes and permissions from the public catalogue. A successful product redirect says nothing about whether a customer can open an old order confirmation and perform the expected action.
Treat launch as a routing change that can fail
Test the mapping against the new system before switching traffic. Check representative destinations for content as well as response behaviour. Look for loops, unintended chains, missing language routes and destinations that only work for a logged-in administrator.
Keep an accountable owner for routing after launch. A redirect configuration may sit with a hosting provider while the new platform team assumes it owns everything. Domain renewal, certificates and the ability to update old routes are ongoing responsibilities, not migration debris.
The uncomfortable part is prioritisation. A visually polished launch can still deserve postponement if commercially important entry points have no agreed outcome. The work is easy to leave until the end because broken historical links do not appear in the new homepage review.
Audit entry points this week
Gather paths from the old catalogue, customer-facing messages and active campaigns. Have commerce and content owners assign a destination or deliberate removal outcome. Flag ambiguous cases rather than inventing automatic substitutes.
Run the resulting map through a repeatable checker and manually inspect the cases with meaningful differences, such as changed language, merged products or retired variants. After launch, watch failed requests and support reports and give corrections an owner. The deliverable is a maintained route map, not a promise that search visibility will remain unchanged. Search outcomes require observation; customer destinations can be tested before the switch.