Simms Fishing's Magento to Shopify migration: the real numbers

Most published migration case studies report a percentage and stop there. Inflow, the agency behind this one, at least names the client, states real launch dates and separates two different measurement windows, which makes it possible to check what is actually being claimed. The client is Simms Fishing, a fly fishing gear retailer, and the migration was a platform switch from Magento to Shopify.

What happened and when#

Inflow had worked with Simms Fishing since September 2018. The site migration itself launched between January 15 and 27, 2022. Inflow’s write-up gives two separate result windows rather than one blended number: a 4-month mark (through roughly May 2022) for the non-brand metrics, and a roughly 10-month mark for the year-over-year organic traffic figure.

The numbers, as Inflow states them#

Organic traffic was up 126% year over year at the later measurement point. In the earlier 4-month window, non-brand category page traffic was up 5,642% and the non-brand keyword footprint was up 1,095%. Inflow does not publish the raw session counts or keyword totals behind any of these percentages, so what is verifiable here is the relative growth the agency reports, not the site’s actual traffic volume before or after.

What actually drove the non-brand jump#

Inflow’s account credits a specific content and information-architecture change made alongside the platform switch, not the migration by itself. The old site had consolidated categories, one “fishing shirts” page under a URL like /t-shirts-hoodies covering hoodies, T-shirts and flannels together. The new structure split that into dedicated pages, /fishing-hoodies/, /fishing-t-shirts/ and /fishing-flannels/, plus similar splits for hats and shoes. Each narrower page could then rank for its own non-brand search terms instead of competing with its siblings for one shared URL. Inflow’s own framing is explicit that this went beyond migration maintenance: “our new content work with Simms took their results beyond the expected.”

Why we care#

A platform migration is usually described as a risk to be survived without traffic loss. This case is one of the more specific published examples of a migration used as the occasion for a structural fix, splitting overly broad category pages, that the agency credits for most of the non-brand gain. The lesson worth taking is the mechanism, not the multiplier: 5,642% is a relative jump from a low base on non-brand category traffic, not a number to expect on a different site’s migration. What travels is the idea that a re-platform is a legitimate moment to also fix a URL structure that was silently capping how many search terms your category pages could ever rank for.