Eight to sixteen weeks for most premium brands. The range depends on catalogue size, how many systems the store talks to, and how much custom functionality has to move rather than be rebuilt. We scope it around the peak season you can't move, so the launch never lands in the week that makes your year.

Often you shouldn't replatform. A store that converts badly usually has a merchandising problem, not a platform problem, and a rebuild resets your SEO and your team's muscle memory for no gain. The Storefront Review exists to answer this in two weeks, before anyone quotes you for a build.

Not if redirects and URL structure are mapped before launch rather than after. Products, customers, order history and search equity all move intact when the migration is planned properly — the losses happen when URL mapping is treated as a launch-week task instead of a design decision.

An agency delivers a project and hands it back. An operating partner keeps running it. In practice that means the person who scoped your build is still on the account eighteen months later, the roadmap is argued in revenue terms rather than ticket counts, and someone senior is accountable when peak season breaks.

A retained monthly engagement with named people on it — the same people who did the build. Priority engineering, a roadmap we review with you, peak rehearsal before the season, and someone on call who has seen your stack break before. Not an SLA and a shared inbox.

Shopify Plus is where we're strongest and where most of our work sits. We'll take migrations off Salesforce, Magento, BigCommerce and WooCommerce, and we work on the surrounding stack — ERP, 3PL, PIM, subscriptions — regardless of platform. If your future isn't on Shopify, we'll say so in the review rather than after the contract.

Two at any one time. The big agencies lead with "500+ stores built" — a premium brand doesn't want to be store #501. Capping it is what makes the Run stage possible at all, because staying on an account costs senior time that volume shops can't afford to give.

Usually as the senior technical owner the relationship is missing — the person who reads the quotes, sets the roadmap and holds them to it. Sometimes the honest answer from a review is that your agency is fine and merchandising is the problem. We'd rather say that than sell you a replatform.