Is It Magento, Your Agency, or Something Else?

Evaluating Agency Performance: Four Critical Questions

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:

1. Do they truly understand your business?

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.

2. What happens after they implement changes?

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.

3. How proactive are they about identifying opportunities?

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.

4. Do they empower your team with knowledge?

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.

Is Magento Itself the Problem?

While agencies often bear significant responsibility for platform struggles, sometimes the platform itself contributes to the challenges. Consider these questions about your Magento implementation:

1. Are maintenance costs justified by the value you receive?

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.

2. Is the change management process overly burdensome?

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.

What We've Observed After Years in eCommerce

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.

Finding the Right Path Forward

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.

Ready to stop treading water with your eCommerce platform?

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.