Diagnosing Your eCommerce Platform Struggles
When your eCommerce platform isn't performing as expected, pinpointing the actual source of your challenges can be difficult. This article will help you identify whether Magento, your agency partner, or even your own processes might be holding you back.
Every day, we speak with merchants who feel trapped in a cycle of maintenance and bug fixes rather than growth and innovation. If this sounds familiar, you might be asking:
The truth is usually more nuanced than any single factor. Let's examine the three potential culprits behind your eCommerce platform challenges.
Your agency partnership should be your greatest asset, not your biggest headache. These four questions can help determine if your agency is contributing to your platform struggles:
When discussing requirements, does your agency immediately grasp what you're asking for, or do you find yourself repeatedly explaining basic concepts about your business?
Insight: An agency that lacks fundamental understanding of your business will struggle to implement effective solutions. This disconnect leads to constant revisions, increasing both costs and frustration while delivering little actual value.
After new features or updates go live, does your site perform better, worse, or the same?
Insight: This directly reflects your agency's development practices and quality assurance processes. At minimum, updates should maintain current performance levels, while ideally improving site functionality and user experience with each release.
Does your agency simply react to your requests, or do they actively suggest improvements and identify potential issues before they become problems?
Insight: While addressing security updates and bug fixes is the minimum expectation, truly valuable partners proactively present opportunities to improve conversions, enhance user experience, and optimize performance. Be wary of agencies that only suggest expensive redesigns or platform migrations—this often indicates prioritizing their revenue over your business outcomes.
Is your agency willing to explain concepts, share their thinking, and help your team become more self-sufficient?
Insight: The agency business model often benefits from client dependency, but the best partners prioritize your long-term success by sharing knowledge and building your capabilities—even if that eventually means you'll need fewer billable hours.
If your agency falls short on these measures, they may be a significant factor in your platform challenges.
However, it's important to consider whether they inherited a problematic codebase from previous developers. Even excellent agencies can struggle when burdened with years of accumulated technical debt.
While agencies often bear significant responsibility for platform struggles, sometimes the platform itself contributes to the challenges. Consider these questions about your Magento implementation:
Do the ongoing costs of maintaining your Magento platform align with the business value it delivers?
Insight: Despite being marketed as "free," Magento Open Source carries substantial operational costs. Even Adobe Commerce requires continued investment in security patches, PHP upgrades, third-party modules, and compliance maintenance.
SaaS platforms like Shopify or BigCommerce do offer lower maintenance burdens, but come with trade-offs in customization flexibility. The key is determining whether your current costs align with your specific business requirements.
Does implementing even small changes require excessive time, resources, and complexity?
Insight: Magento's enterprise architecture necessarily involves more overhead than simpler platforms. Some of this complexity—like proper staging environments and testing procedures—represents best practices rather than inefficiency.
For mid-market merchants, however, this process can feel unnecessarily restrictive. The question becomes whether Magento's robust capabilities align with your actual business needs. As organizations scale, what initially seems like overhead often becomes essential infrastructure.
While less common, merchant practices can sometimes exacerbate platform challenges:
Do you validate ideas through small proof-of-concepts before committing to full custom development?
Insight: Starting with existing modules or phased implementations allows you to test concepts with minimal investment. This approach helps identify which features truly deliver value and deserve further development, preventing resource drain on features that don't move the needle.
Are you open to your agency's strategic input, or do you simply hand them a predetermined task list?
Insight: Quality agencies bring valuable perspective and specialized knowledge to your eCommerce operation. If you never allow them to influence priorities or suggest alternative approaches, you might be missing opportunities for significant improvements.
After helping hundreds of merchants diagnose and resolve platform challenges, we've found responsibility typically breaks down this way:
In most cases (approximately 60%), the agency is the primary factor. Inconsistent project management, reactive service models, and misaligned technical approaches create more problems than they solve.
About 20% of the time, the platform itself contributes significantly. While Magento does have inherent complexity, properly managed implementations can be both powerful and maintainable. The issue is usually how that complexity is handled rather than the platform itself.
The remaining 20% involves merchant-side factors. Sometimes internal processes, decision-making approaches, or constraints placed on agency partners contribute to ongoing challenges.
Every major eCommerce platform—whether Magento, Shopify, BigCommerce, or others—has merchants migrating both to and from it. This isn't evidence that any platform is universally superior, but rather that different business models require different technological approaches.
The key is finding the right combination of platform capabilities, agency expertise, and internal processes for your specific business needs.
With decades of experience across multiple platforms, SwiftOtter specializes in helping mid-market merchants chart a course toward sustainable growth.
Reach out to our team to schedule a conversation about your specific eCommerce situation. We're committed to providing honest, valuable guidance—whether that ultimately involves working with us or not.
