Six questions to ask a Shopify agency before you replatform

1. Have they used the platform you are leaving, not just the one you are moving to?

This is the one most brands forget to ask, and it matters more than the reverse. Everyone will tell you they know the platform you are moving to. That is the easy half. The complexity in a replatform sits in the system you are leaving behind:

• The logic that has built up over years

• The integrations no one fully remembers

• The edge cases that only exist because of how that old platform worked.

An agency that has only ever worked on the destination platform tends to discover these things the hard way, on your time and your budget. Experience on the platform you are migrating from is what tells you whether someone can see the whole job rather than half of it.

2. How far does the agency go beyond the build?

A replatform is rarely just a build. It touches:

• SEO and search visibility, so you do not lose rankings in the move

• Content strategy and how your team publishes day to day

• UX and design in house, so design and build are one team rather than a handoff between two

• The integrations that keep everything running smoothly

Ask how many of these the agency can handle itself. The more of this one agency can do in house, the less you are left filling in the gaps or stitching separate suppliers together and hoping they line up.

3. Can they show you numbers?

It’s easy to make portfolios look good. It’s harder to fake the impact the work had. Ask a shortlisted agency to show you:

• What a comparable replatform did to sales and conversion

• What it did to operating costs, not just how the site looked

• Whether they have worked in your vertical, and what they learned there

If an agency only ever shows you how nice a site looked, and never what it did to the numbers, that tells you plenty on its own. You want the ones who lead with results, because they are the ones treating your project as an investment rather than a redesign.

4. Is the biggest agency really the safest choice?

It is tempting to assume it is. There is a real pull, especially when you know you will have to justify the decision to someone else later, towards the largest agency you can find. Part of that instinct is the idea that a big agency could throw thirty more developers at your project if it started slipping.

In practice that reassurance is mostly a myth. This kind of work is fairly linear. If someone offered me thirty extra developers halfway through a project, it would not help much, because that is not how these builds actually get delivered. Small, focused teams are how everyone does this work, including the large agencies, who tend to run smaller teams inside the bigger structure anyway. The real safety is not headcount. It is whether the team in front of you understands what needs to be built and why, and can talk you through the risks before you hit them rather than after.

5. Why is one quote so much cheaper than the rest?

If you put the same brief out to a few agencies and one comes back at half the price, that gap is telling you something. It usually means one of a few things:

• They have scoped something smaller than everyone else

• They are likely to hit you with change requests once the project is underway

• They are taking a deliberate loss now in the hope it leads to more work later

It is a bit like getting a quote from a builder that comes in at half the price of the others. Usually it’s because they are not using the same materials. So rather than taking the cheap number at face value, ask what is different about it. A good agency will happily walk you through why its price is what it is.

6. Do you trust the team you would actually work with?

You could talk to ten agencies that are all, on paper, capable of doing the job. Past a certain point, the questions above only get you so far. What is left is simpler and harder to measure: do you trust the people you would actually be working with. Not the salesperson in the pitch, but the team you would speak to every week. That is usually what decides whether a project is a good experience or a painful one, and it is worth weighing as heavily as anything technical.

We know platform migrations inside out, and we always want to hear how we can help. If you’re looking for an agency to support you, or just want to understand what’s involved, get in touch.