Opencar 301 Redirecting issue with ?route= - .htaccess

Question

I have restructure the website from WordPress to Opencart and so all URL has been changed. I am trying to redirect my old products page with new but it is not redirecting since OpenCart adding some weird ?route= and so on..
Here is my .htaccess
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^sitemap.xml$ index.php?route=feed/google_sitemap [L]
RewriteRule ^googlebase.xml$ index.php?route=feed/google_base [L]
RewriteRule ^download/(.*) /index.php?route=error/not_found [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !.*\.(ico|gif|jpg|jpeg|png|js|css)
RewriteRule ^([^?]*) index.php?_route_=$1 [L,QSA]
Redirect 301 /store/products/old-item-name/ http://store.mydomain.com/new-item-name
It is redirecting to this weird url
http://store.mydomain.com/new-item-name?_route_=store/products/old-item-name/
I appreciate your great help.. million thanks

Answer 1

This is because the Redirect is part of mod_alias and everything else is part of mod_rewrite. The two modules get applied at different points of the URL-file processing pipeline, and in this case your request is getting applied by both modules. You need to move the redirect up to the top and stick to just mod_rewrite:
So remove:
Redirect 301 /store/products/old-item-name/ http://store.mydomain.com/new-item-name
and add this to the top:
RewriteRule ^products/old-item-name(/.*)$ http://store.mydomain.com/new-item-name$1 [L,R=301]

Answer 2

Last Redirect 301 rules is getting redirected by previous RewriteRule rule. In general its not advisable to mix mod_alias and mod_rewrite:
Try changing the last RewriteRule to this:
Options +FollowSymLinks -MultiViews
# Turn mod_rewrite on
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
# your 301 rules from old to new
RewriteRule ^products/old-item-name(/.*|)$ new-item-name$1 [NC,L,R=301]
RewriteRule ^sitemap.xml$ index.php?route=feed/google_sitemap [L]
RewriteRule ^googlebase\.xml$ index.php?route=feed/google_base [L]
RewriteRule ^download/(.*) /index.php?route=error/not_found [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !\.(ico|gif|jpe?g|png|js|css)$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php?_route_=$1 [L,QSA]

Answer 3

have just had a similiar problem when migrating from Ashop to OpenCart
the old urls were of the format
http://www.example.com/p/productid/manufacturer-productname.html
and were being redirected to
http://www.example.com/manufacturer/
the solutions was
RewriteRule ^(.*)manufacturer(-.*|)$ http://www.example.com/manufacturer/ [NC,L,R=301]
hope that helps someone.....
note you cannot directly match on manufacturer as a redirect loop will happen so match included the '-'