A website migration puts an existing business at risk every time it changes how customers find products, follow advertisements, or complete purchases. Before approving one, a business owner needs evidence that those paths will survive the move.
The 7NEWS report about Adorn Cosmetics shows the stakes. Use the play button on the cover to open the original 2-minute, 40-second report from 7NEWS Australia in a video window on this page.
What the Adorn Cosmetics report tells us
According to the report, Briony Kennedy’s business reached roughly $6 million in annual turnover. Adobe encouraged a move to its commerce platform, with Convert Digital implementing the project. The report shows an email citing potential revenue increases of 34% to 94%. Those figures should be understood as sales projections, rather than an independently verified forecast or a proven contractual guarantee. Watch the report at 0:42 to 1:14.
Kennedy says sales fell by approximately 30% immediately after launch. She also says Facebook and Instagram advertising, costing about $1 million annually, stopped linking back to the website correctly. The report describes mounting debt, staff cuts, the sale of her home, and a subsequent move to Shopify. Adobe declined to comment for legal reasons, according to 7NEWS. Watch her account and Adobe’s reported response.
The report provides no technical audit establishing which defects caused which losses. It also does not document a complete stop in sales. A substantial decline, however, can still threaten a business whose expenses continue.
Where Magento fits into the story
Adobe announced its agreement to buy Magento Commerce for US$1.68 billion in May 2018 and announced completion of the acquisition on June 19, 2018. The purchase brought an established ecommerce platform into Adobe’s business. See Adobe’s acquisition announcement and completion announcement.
Magento Commerce subsequently became Adobe Commerce. Magento Open Source continued as a separate offering. That distinction matters when evaluating licensing, hosting, maintenance, and implementation costs. Read Adobe’s explanation of the product names.
An established platform can still be implemented badly. Equally, a failed implementation does not establish that the underlying platform is incapable of running a successful store. A proper investigation must separate the software, the implementation, the marketing configuration, and the responsibilities each party accepted.
What could cause sales to collapse after a migration?
The useful starting point is:
Revenue = visitors × purchase conversion rate × average order value.
A migration can damage any of those factors. Several problems can occur together.
| Possible failure | How it could reduce sales | Evidence needed |
|---|---|---|
| Broken advertising destinations | Shoppers reach errors, unrelated pages, or redirect loops. | Ad destination exports, redirect tests, server logs, and mobile testing. |
| Lost organic visibility | Previously productive pages disappear from search or lose relevance. | Search Console history, old and new crawls, URL mappings, and indexing checks. |
| Checkout or payment defects | Customers arrive and select products but cannot finish buying. | Checkout tests, payment failures, funnel data, and customer reports. |
| Slower or harder shopping | Pages load poorly, navigation becomes confusing, or buying requires more effort. | Device-level performance, conversion comparisons, and usability testing. |
| Incorrect advertising measurement or settings | Reports become unreliable, or campaigns spend against unsuitable goals. | Event tests, campaign change history, and reconciliation with actual orders. |
| Broken customer and product integrations | Accounts, stock availability, promotions, or repeat-purchase systems stop working correctly. | Integration logs and tests of real customer journeys. |
Keep years of SEO connected.
A new design still needs the links, content, and access that made the previous site valuable.
A backlink to a missing page, a removed landing page, or an accidental indexing block can interrupt the progress built over years.
These are investigation paths, not findings about Adorn. Changes in demand, pricing, competition, or inventory also need consideration before attributing every loss to the migration.
Start with the advertising links
Kennedy’s allegation about advertising destinations is the clearest technical clue in the report.
Imagine an advertisement pointing to a particular product. The new platform changes that product’s address, but nobody updates the advertisement or creates a working redirect. A customer taps the ad and reaches an error page.
Another possibility is that the link opens the homepage instead of the advertised product. The website technically loads, but the customer must search again for something they expected to buy immediately.
Neither problem requires anyone to change the campaign’s targeting or budget. A website migration can break an otherwise functioning campaign by changing its destination.
That means “the campaigns were mismanaged” is a conclusion that requires more evidence. The failure could involve URL migration, campaign maintenance, an integration, or coordination between teams.
Before launch, test the actual advertising journey on phones, including Facebook and Instagram’s in-app browsers. Check individual product ads, catalog links, promotional pages, and links containing tracking parameters. Follow each journey through a completed purchase.
If destinations fail after launch, pause affected spending while the team repairs and retests them.
SEO damage is another serious possibility
A migration can preserve the domain name while changing the pages that earned its traffic.
Product and category addresses might change. Useful content might disappear. Internal links might stop working. A production site might accidentally retain settings intended to keep its staging version out of search.
Google specifically identifies incorrect redirects, accidental noindex directives, crawling blocks, and inadequate server capacity as migration problems. Its guidance calls for mapping old URLs to appropriate replacements, testing the move, and monitoring search performance afterward. Read Google’s site migration guidance.
Search engines also need access to the intended page content. Rendering errors or conflicting canonical signals deserve investigation when important pages disappear from search. Using JavaScript alone does not establish an SEO problem. See Google’s JavaScript SEO documentation.
The timing helps narrow the diagnosis. Broken links or payment failures can affect customers immediately. Search visibility changes depend on how Google discovers and processes the changed pages.
For this case, we cannot responsibly say that anyone destroyed Adorn’s SEO without historical search data. We can say that preserving organic traffic should be a written migration requirement, with someone accountable for verifying it.
Tracking failures can hide problems and complicate advertising
A new store might record purchases incorrectly, lose transaction values, or stop sending conversion events.
First establish whether sales actually declined. Compare analytics with the order database, payment processor, refunds, and cancellations. A broken dashboard can make a functioning store appear to have lost revenue.
Measurement failures can also affect advertising systems that use conversion data. Google explicitly documents that incorrect conversion data can disrupt Smart Bidding. That is a general example of the mechanism, not evidence that Adorn used Google Ads or experienced this particular fault. Read Google’s guidance on conversion-data outages.
Test a purchase through every measurement system in use. Confirm that the transaction appears with the expected value and that duplicate events do not inflate the result.
A business can become unviable while orders still arrive
Consider a hypothetical store that loses 20% of its visitors while its conversion rate falls by 25%. With average order value unchanged, revenue falls by 40%.
That example is illustrative, not a reconstruction of Adorn’s accounts.
Now add implementation payments, software fees, support costs, and spending to repair the problems. Rent, payroll, inventory commitments, and debt payments may continue throughout the disruption.
Technical recovery and financial recovery are different tasks. Restoring a checkout or moving again does not repay the losses accumulated while the business struggled.
Before committing, assess whether the company could survive a prolonged revenue decline alongside the full cost of the new platform.
What to require before approving a migration
Business owners should ask for concrete deliverables:
- A documented reason to move. Identify the present limitation and compare migration with repairing or upgrading the existing system.
- A performance baseline. Save sales, margins, conversion rates, channel performance, search traffic, and the pages producing revenue.
- A URL migration plan. Inventory existing pages, preserve useful addresses where practical, and test redirects for changed pages.
- A complete purchase test. Cover important devices, payment methods, shipping rules, discounts, customer accounts, and order fulfillment.
- An advertising and measurement handover. Name the people responsible for destinations, catalogs, events, campaign settings, and monitoring.
- Clear commercial responsibilities. Establish acceptance criteria, support coverage, defect handling, account ownership, data access, and exit arrangements before signing.
- A workable rollback plan. Explain how the team would restore service while protecting orders, payments, inventory, and customer data created after launch.
- Independent verification. Have someone representing the business check the revenue-critical paths before final acceptance.
A platform recommendation should come with a convincing explanation of how the project will protect existing revenue. Forecasts deserve scrutiny: what assumptions produce the promised increase, what expenses accompany it, and what happens if the increase never arrives?
What to do if sales fall after launch
Treat the decline as an incident. Confirm the loss against actual orders and payments, identify which channels and devices changed, and test the affected journeys immediately.
Preserve logs and campaign change history before making further changes. Pause spending that sends customers into confirmed failures. Assign one person to coordinate the investigation across development, advertising, analytics, and operations.
Search fluctuations can accompany a migration. Broken advertising links and failed payments need immediate action.
A business owner should not need to become a developer to commission a website safely. They should be able to require a tested migration plan, clear responsibility, and evidence that customers can still find the business and buy from it.
