Pick the right platform — without the marketing fluff

It depends almost entirely on data quality rather than platform. Clean product data with consistent variants migrates quickly. Fifteen years of inconsistent WordPress posts, or products with hand-typed variant names, is where the time goes. We look before quoting, and the quote is a fixed price.

The licence is free. The hosting, security patching, backups and the person who fixes it at 2am are not. For most small teams a hosted platform is cheaper over three years once someone has to own the maintenance. Open source wins when you genuinely need control that hosted platforms will not give you.

Yes — send the shape of what you are building, your catalogue size and who will maintain it, and you will get a direct recommendation with the reasoning. No discovery fee and no sales call, and the answer is sometimes that you do not need us for it.

Most platform mistakes are survivable and cheaper to work around than to migrate away from. The genuinely expensive mistakes are structural — choosing something that cannot handle your checkout logic or your catalogue size — which is why those two questions come first in any conversation we have about this.

Judge it by whether we ever recommend against ourselves, because we do. If Squarespace will genuinely serve a five-page brochure site better than a custom build, that is what we will say, and it is the smaller invoice. The test for any agency comparison page is whether a "wrong" answer ever wins. On ours, several do.

Pick the one your team can operate without calling us. Ongoing editing ability beats a marginal feature advantage almost every time, and it is the factor most often left out of comparison tables because it does not fit in a column.

Not if the redirects are done properly and the URL structure is planned before the build rather than after. Expect a short dip while Google re-crawls. Anyone promising zero impact has either not done many migrations or is not telling you about the ones that went badly.

There is no answer to that question without your constraints. The ones that actually decide it are your catalogue size, whether you sell subscriptions, how much bespoke checkout logic you need, who will maintain it after launch, and what your team already knows. A platform that your team cannot edit is the wrong platform whatever its feature list says.

Platform pricing and features change, sometimes without notice, so treat the figures as a guide and check the vendor before committing. Prices quoted here are facts about Shopify, Wix and the rest rather than claims about us, and the disclaimer covers them going stale.

Usually not. Migration costs real money and loses history, so unless the platform is actively blocking something you need, the honest answer is to stay and fix what is broken. We will tell you when a migration is genuinely justified, and it is less often than agencies imply.

Usually yes — the list covers what we are asked about most, not a limit. If it is something genuinely unfamiliar, we will say so rather than learn it on your budget.

We are a Shopify Partner, which is disclosed on the site. Partner status does not pay us to recommend Shopify, and we routinely recommend other platforms where they fit better. If we ever did have a financial interest in a recommendation, we would state it on the page making it.