In June 2025, Hampers & Gifts Australia moved its websites to Shopify.
Nothing wrong with that. Companies change platforms all the time, usually for good reasons, and Shopify is a perfectly decent place to sell hampers.
Then Christmas arrived, which for a hamper company is not one trading period among many. It’s THE trading period. And organic search traffic was down by as much as 38% going into it.
Parent company Maggie Beer Holdings reported its FY26 results on 2 September 2026. Hampers & Gifts Australia’s net sales came in at AU$41.4 million, down 6.3% on the year before. About AU$800,000 went on extra advertising to prop up the traffic and sales that used to arrive on their own. Group statutory loss for the year was AU$9.53 million.
Website migration damage doesn’t show up when the migration happens
I’m not going to tell you that a redirect map caused a AU$9.5 million loss, because it didn’t. There’s a lot of other stuff in a set of annual accounts, and the group lost considerably more the year before. Anyone selling you that headline is doing the thing I complain about constantly.
What I will tell you is that AU$800,000 of emergency advertising is a real, specific, itemised number, and it exists because search traffic that used to be free stopped arriving.
Look at the dates. Site moved in June. Traffic problem showed up in November and December. Number reached the public in September the following year, fifteen months after anyone touched a URL.
That’s kinda the problem with migrations – the decision and the results can be separated by more than a year. By the time the cost turns up, it’s been through so many meetings that nobody’s calling it a migration any more. It’s a challenging trading environment. It’s increased competition in the gifting sector. It’s consumer sentiment.
It’s easy to forget the redirects when the person who’d notice isn’t in the room and the deadline is next Thursday.
This isn’t a Shopify problem and moving platforms isn’t the risk
Shopify didn’t do this. Neither did WordPress, Webflow, Squarespace or whatever your developer is fond of. Platforms don’t lose your traffic. What loses your traffic is the bit in the middle, where every URL on the old site has to point at the right URL on the new one, permanently, with a 301, including the ones nobody remembers publishing in 2019.
Shopify does have its own URL structure, and it’s not the same as most other platforms. Product URLs sit under /products/, collections under /collections/. If your old site had different paths, and most do, then every single one of them needs mapping before you go live. That’s a job someone has to sit down and do properly, and it’s boring, and it’s the first thing cut when the launch date slips.
The platform gets blamed. The unmapped URLs did it.
Monitoring during a website migration is what stops small problems becoming expensive ones
I ran a migration for a pharmaceutical company where I was involved for weeks before the staging site was sent live. and then watched everything from the moment the new site launched. From day one, looking at what Google was crawling, what was returning 404s, what had dropped out of the index and what was still ranking.
Things went wrong. (Things always go wrong.) The difference was that we found them in the first week, while they were still a handful of URLs, rather than in month four when they’d become a pattern Google had settled into.
Their traffic stayed stable through the whole thing. It’s hard though, because it looks like nothing on a report, which is exactly why this work is so hard to sell. Nobody ever writes a case study called “nothing happened, as planned.“
Without it, they’d have lost a lot. And the losses wouldn’t have appeared for months, at which point recovering them would have taken far longer than catching them did.
What to check before your website migration goes live
The version of this you can do yourself is short. Get a full list of every URL on the current site, including old blog posts and PDFs. Map each one to where it’s going. Test the redirects on staging, not after launch. Write down what your traffic and rankings look like now, so you’ve got something to compare against when someone asks whether the new site is working.
Then keep watching for at least three months, because the first fortnight looks fine on almost every broken migration I’ve ever inherited.
If you’re planning a move and you’d rather someone checked the boring bits, that’s what my website migration service is for.
