Changing the agency that supports your Magento website is a significant undertaking and not one that companies take lightly.
Your online store may have been developed and maintained over several years. It could contain bespoke functionality, integrations with business-critical systems, custom pricing rules and a long history of development decisions. Your existing agency may also hold important knowledge about how everything fits together.
But staying with an ecommerce agency that no longer meets your needs can pose much greater long-term risks.
Perhaps development is taking too long and causing delays to your company’s growth. Communication might have become difficult and issues keep recurring rather than being properly resolved. Or perhaps you simply need a partner with greater technical or sector expertise to support the next stage of your growth.
Whatever the reason, moving an ecommerce support contract to another agency is entirely achievable with the right planning.
Fluid Commerce specialises in providing ongoing ecommerce support and development for B2B businesses using Magento Open Source and Adobe Commerce. If you are looking for a new Magento or Adobe Commerce support agency, we understand that taking over an established ecommerce platform requires a very different approach from building a new website from scratch.
In this guide, we explain what is involved in changing ecommerce support agencies, what you should consider before making the move and what experience your new agency should have to make the transition as smooth as possible.
Contents
- Why do businesses change Magento support agencies?
- Changing agency does not mean changing platform
- What is involved in moving a Magento support contract to another agency?
- What should your new Magento support agency know?
- What does Fluid Commerce’s approach to taking over a Magento store look like?
- A real-world example of changing Magento agency
- Questions to ask a potential new Magento support agency
- What should you prepare before moving agency?
- Don’t forget the commercial relationship
- How long should changing Magento agency take?
- Should you tell your existing agency that you are moving?
- Red flags when choosing a new Magento support agency
- Changing Magento support agency: your handover checklist
- Ready to change Magento support agency?
Why do businesses change Magento support agencies?
There does not have to be a catastrophic problem with your current Magento agency before you consider moving and sometimes a business simply outgrows the relationship.
This can be because your ecommerce platform has become more complex with the introduction of new B2B functionality, international stores, ERP integrations, or more sophisticated customer journeys. All this may have resulted in an increase in revenue.
So far, so good. However, the agency that was suitable three or four years ago might not have the technical capabilities you need today.
Common reasons for considering a new ecommerce support agency include:
- Slow response times or poor communication – having to repeatedly chase your agency to get things done, or even to receive a response within a reasonable timeframe, can cause frustration and make it difficult to plan effectively.
- Development work repeatedly missing deadlines – projects continually taking longer than promised, delaying launches, campaigns and wider business initiatives, particularly when other teams or suppliers are dependent on the work being completed.
- A lack of proactive recommendations – the agency only acts when you give it a task, rather than identifying improvements, highlighting potential risks or suggesting ways your ecommerce store could perform better.
- Recurring technical problems – the same issues keep appearing because the underlying cause is never properly investigated or resolved, resulting in time and budget repeatedly being spent on temporary fixes.
- Website performance or stability issues – slow page speeds, outages, checkout problems or periods of instability can damage the customer experience and potentially result in lost sales.
- Concerns about security or outstanding platform upgrades – important security patches, Magento or Adobe Commerce upgrades, extension updates or other maintenance may have been postponed, leaving you concerned about the technical health of your store.
- A growing backlog of development work – important improvements remain untouched for months because your agency does not have sufficient capacity, or there is no clear process for prioritising and progressing your development roadmap.
- Difficulty integrating the ecommerce platform with other systems – your agency may lack the expertise to effectively connect your store to systems such as your ERP, PIM, CRM, WMS, or OMS, leading to technical problems or inefficient manual processes.
- A lack of B2B ecommerce expertise – requirements such as customer-specific pricing, company accounts, credit purchasing, complex catalogues and ERP integrations can require specialist experience that a predominantly D2C agency may not have.
- Limited Magento or Adobe Commerce expertise – your ecommerce requirements may have become more sophisticated than your agency’s technical capabilities, making it harder to implement new functionality or resolve complex issues.
- Too much reliance on individual developers – if knowledge of your website sits primarily with one developer, progress can slow considerably when that person is unavailable or leaves the agency.
- Poor visibility of where support hours and budget are being spent – you may receive invoices without a clear understanding of what has been completed, how much time individual tasks have required or what value the work has delivered.
- A lack of strategic ecommerce advice – your agency may be technically capable of completing development tickets but offer little guidance on your wider ecommerce roadmap, priorities or opportunities for growth.
- The need for greater development capacity – as your ecommerce operation grows, you may require access to a larger team or a broader range of specialists to deliver projects alongside day-to-day support and maintenance.
- A change in the business’s ecommerce strategy – expansion into B2B, international markets, new sales channels or a different ecommerce model can create requirements that your existing agency is not equipped to support.
There can also simply be a feeling that the relationship has become reactive and the agency is not sharing your vision for company growth. A good Magento support agency should not just wait for you to report problems. It should understand your business, identify opportunities and help you continually improve your ecommerce platform.
Changing agency does not mean changing platform
Moving your support contract from one agency to another does not mean you need to migrate away from Magento or Adobe Commerce.
In many cases, the platform itself is perfectly capable of supporting the company’s future plans. The problem may be how it has been developed, maintained or managed.
At Fluid Commerce, we regularly inherit established ecommerce stores. Some are technically healthy and require relatively straightforward onboarding. Others have accumulated technical debt, outdated extensions, fragile integrations, performance issues or bespoke development that makes upgrades unnecessarily difficult.
Before recommending significant changes, your new agency should understand what it has inherited.
The objective should not be to criticise everything the previous agency has done or immediately propose a rebuild. It should be to establish what works, what needs attention and where the greatest risks and opportunities are.
What is involved in moving a Magento support contract to another agency?
The exact process will depend on the complexity of your ecommerce operation, but a well-managed transition should normally involve several stages.
1. Understand your existing contract
Before agreeing on a start date with another agency, check your current support agreement.
Pay particular attention to:
- Notice periods
- Contract end dates
- Outstanding development projects
- Prepaid development or support hours
- Ownership of source code and intellectual property
- Hosting agreements
- Third-party licences
- Domain and DNS management
- Software or extension licences held by the agency
- Access to repositories and development environments
- Any termination or handover provisions
Ideally, there should be an overlap or clearly agreed handover period rather than an abrupt switch.
2. Identify who controls your ecommerce assets
One of the most important questions is: does your business have access to everything required to operate its ecommerce store?
Your company should understand where its important digital assets are held and who controls them.
Depending on your platform and technology stack, these could include:
- Magento or Adobe Commerce administration
- Source-code repositories
- Hosting accounts
- Development, staging and production environments
- Domain and DNS accounts
- CDN and caching services
- SSL certificates
- Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager
- Search Console
- Payment gateways
- ERP, PIM, CRM, OMS and WMS integrations
- Search and personalisation platforms
- Email platforms
- Third-party applications and extensions
- Deployment systems
- API credentials
- Monitoring and error-reporting services
- Documentation and technical specifications
Do not wait until the final day of your existing contract to establish whether these accounts are controlled by your business or your agency.
Your new agency should help you create a handover checklist so that nothing important is missed.
3. Carry out discovery
There is more to supporting an ecommerce store than understanding its code and the incoming agency also needs to understand your business.
For B2B companies in particular, ecommerce processes can be significantly more complex than they may initially appear.
A manufacturer’s website, for example, could include customer-specific pricing, individual catalogues, company account structures, multiple buyers, purchasing permissions, credit limits, purchase orders and rapid ordering tools.
Behind the storefront, there could be an ERP controlling pricing, inventory and customer data, a PIM supplying product information and an OMS or WMS managing fulfilment.
A new agency therefore needs to understand both how the technology works and how your business works.
Discovery should cover your commercial objectives, customers, internal processes, technology stack, current frustrations and development priorities.
4. Audit the existing platform
Once access has been granted, the incoming agency should assess the store’s technical health.
This is particularly important with Magento Open Source and Adobe Commerce, where years of custom development can result in a complex codebase.
The audit may look at areas including:
- Platform and software versions
- Security patches
- Bespoke modules and functionality
- Third-party extensions
- Code quality
- Frontend implementation
- Hosting and infrastructure
- Deployment processes
- Performance and Core Web Vitals
- Error logs
- Cron jobs and background processes
- Integrations
- Database health
- Upgrade readiness
- Technical debt
Issues should be assessed according to business risk and priority. A security vulnerability or unreliable order integration will normally deserve attention before a relatively minor frontend improvement.
5. Understand every important integration
Integrations deserve particular attention during an agency transition.
For many B2B businesses, the ecommerce website is one component of a much larger technology ecosystem.
Magento or Adobe Commerce could be exchanging information with an ERP, PIM, CRM, WMS, OMS, payment provider, fulfilment service, search platform and numerous other systems.
Your new agency needs to understand what information is moving between those systems, how frequently it moves and what happens when something fails.
Questions should include:
- Where does the master product data live?
- Where are prices calculated?
- Which system controls stock?
- How are customer-specific prices transferred?
- How are orders passed to the ERP?
- How are order statuses returned to the website?
- What happens if an API is unavailable?
- Are failures logged and monitored?
- Is there retry or fallback logic?
- Who supports each external system?
These details can make the difference between a smooth handover and discovering a business-critical dependency after something has already stopped working.
6. Review the development backlog
You may already have months of tickets, feature requests and projects waiting to be completed.
The new agency should not necessarily accept the existing backlog at face value, but rather use their learning period as a useful opportunity to reassess it.
Some tickets may no longer be relevant, whilst others may be symptoms of a deeper technical problem. On the other hand, some projects may deliver significantly greater commercial value than others.
Your new agency should help turn the backlog into a prioritised roadmap based on factors such as business value, customer impact, risk, effort and technical dependencies.
What should your new Magento support agency know?
Platform experience should be one of your first considerations.
If you have an established Magento Open Source store, you need developers with extensive Magento experience. The same applies to Adobe Commerce.
If you are comparing Magento agencies in the UK for ongoing support, rather than simply commissioning a one-off development project, look closely at each agency’s experience of maintaining and improving established stores.
But knowing the platform itself is only the starting point.
Experience supporting existing websites
Building a new ecommerce website and inheriting somebody else’s website require different skills.
An incoming agency needs developers who are comfortable investigating unfamiliar code and understanding why previous technical decisions were made.
They should be able to distinguish between code that is simply different from how they would have written it and code that genuinely creates a problem.
This is particularly important when looking for Magento takeover support, because the incoming team needs to become familiar with an established codebase without unnecessarily disrupting a live ecommerce operation.
Automatically replacing bespoke functionality can waste significant amounts of money and introduce unnecessary risk.
B2B experience
The agency should also understand your ecommerce model extremely well.
Fluid Commerce specialises in working with B2B companies, including manufacturers, wholesalers, distributors and suppliers.
This matters because B2B ecommerce in particular introduces requirements that may be unfamiliar to agencies predominantly experienced in straightforward consumer retail.
Customer-specific pricing, company accounts, complex catalogues, credit purchasing, approval workflows, repeat ordering and deep ERP integrations all need to be understood when supporting a B2B platform.
Integration expertise
Ask prospective agencies about their integration experience as this is not an area to be trusted to someone inexperienced.
They should be comfortable working with ERP, PIM, CRM, OMS and WMS systems and understand the operational consequences when integrations fail.
Fluid Commerce, for example, has worked with a wide range of business systems and provides specialist Magento and Adobe Commerce integration expertise.
Security and upgrade experience
Ongoing support should include maintaining the technical health of your ecommerce platform, rather than allowing upgrades and maintenance to accumulate indefinitely.
For Magento Open Source and Adobe Commerce stores, ask how the agency handles security patches, platform upgrades, extension updates and technical debt. Effective Magento website support should include this preventative maintenance rather than focusing exclusively on new development.
Performance expertise
Site speed and stability have a direct effect on customer experience and ecommerce performance.
Your agency should therefore be capable of diagnosing performance issues rather than simply installing new functionality.
Ask how it monitors performance, identifies bottlenecks and investigates unexplained periods of instability.
Experience with your frontend technology
For Magento and Adobe Commerce businesses, this can include experience with your particular frontend approach.
If you use Hyvä, for example, choose an agency with strong Hyvä development expertise rather than assuming every Magento developer has the same level of experience with it.
Commercial ecommerce experience
Technical ability is essential, but your agency should also understand the commercial rationale behind the development work it undertakes.
A good ecommerce support partner should do more than simply ask which ticket you want to tackle next. It should take the time to understand the problem you are trying to solve, how important it is to your customers and whether the proposed development is the most effective way to achieve the desired outcome.
That also means helping you prioritise. With a limited development budget and competing demands, your agency should be able to advise where investment is likely to have the greatest impact, whether that is improving conversion, increasing revenue, making it easier for customers to buy or creating greater operational efficiency.
This more strategic approach helps move the relationship beyond outsourced development towards a genuine ecommerce partnership, where technical decisions are made with your wider business objectives in mind.
What does Fluid Commerce's approach to taking over a Magento store look like?
When Fluid Commerce inherits an established Magento store, our priority is to understand it before making assumptions about what needs changing.
That means getting to know both the business and its technology.
For Magento Open Source and Adobe Commerce stores, this can include investigating the existing codebase, integrations, modules, frontend, security position, performance and upgrade path.
We want to understand why recurring problems are happening rather than continually treating the symptoms.
Once we understand the platform, we can distinguish between immediate risks, technical improvements that should be planned and longer-term development opportunities.
Our support approach combines ongoing development and maintenance with proactive account management.
Clients have a dedicated point of contact who gets to know their business, while our development and technical teams provide the specialist expertise required to maintain and improve the platform.
The aim is not simply to keep the website running; it is to create a stable technical foundation and then continually improve the ecommerce experience in line with the company’s wider commercial objectives.
A real-world example of changing Magento agency
Fluid Commerce has direct experience of taking over ecommerce platforms when businesses need a new development partner.
The Rayware Group is a leading UK B2B housewares supplier behind household-name brands including Kilner, Mason Cash and Viners. Communication with its previous agency had broken down, technical issues were going unresolved, and the business was no longer getting the support it needed to meet its growth objectives. Rayware wanted a more responsive and proactive partner who could stabilise its websites and help the business grow.
Rayware runs several Adobe Commerce websites, but its top priority was its B2B store, which sells to department stores, caterers, garden centres and gift shops.
We began by getting to know Rayware’s short and long-term goals before making recommendations. Within the first month, we had resolved the outstanding technical issues that had been causing site instability. We then:
- implemented GA4 ecommerce tracking across Rayware’s five websites
- improved site speed and Core Web Vitals by addressing JavaScript bundling and render-blocking scripts
- added Apple Pay and Google Pay through Adyen, alongside PayPal instalment messaging
As a result, the B2B customer portal is now faster and more efficient, and it gives trade customers a better experience.
Importantly, the work did not stop once the platform was stable. Fluid Commerce has since built a dedicated US website to support Rayware’s overseas expansion. Rayware’s dedicated account manager continues to provide ongoing ecommerce consultancy to help the business grow.
Read the full Rayware case study
It demonstrates an important point: changing agency should not just solve today’s support problem. The right partner should be capable of supporting where your ecommerce operation is going next.
Questions to ask a potential new Magento support agency
Before making a decision, ask prospective agencies about both their technical experience and the way the relationship will work.
If you are comparing a Magento development agency in the UK with other potential partners, these questions can help distinguish an agency suited to a long-term support relationship from one primarily focused on new website builds.
Useful questions include:
Have you taken over Magento websites developed by other agencies before?
Ask for specific examples.
How will you assess our existing website before beginning development?
There should be a clear onboarding, discovery or audit process.
Who will actually work on our account?
Understand who your account manager, developers and senior technical contacts will be.
What experience do you have with our platform?
Ask specifically about Magento Open Source or Adobe Commerce rather than accepting general “ecommerce experience”.
Do you understand B2B ecommerce?
If B2B represents an important part of your business, ask for examples involving company accounts, customer-specific pricing, ERP integrations and other complex functionality.
What integration experience do you have?
Discuss the systems your business currently uses.
How do you prioritise urgent issues?
Understand the support and escalation process before an emergency occurs. If access to Magento emergency support is important to your business, establish what constitutes an emergency, how issues are escalated and what response you can expect.
How do you handle security and upgrades?
There should be a proactive approach rather than upgrades only being discussed when the website becomes dangerously outdated.
How transparent is reporting?
You should be able to understand what has been worked on and where your support budget is being spent.
How will you help us develop an ecommerce roadmap?
Support should include looking forward, not simply maintaining what already exists.
Can we speak to existing clients?
References can provide valuable insight into responsiveness, communication and what the agency is like to work with over the longer term.
What should you prepare before moving agency?
You can make the transition significantly easier by gathering information before the new support contract begins.
Create a record of your technology stack, integrations, third-party suppliers, current development projects and known issues.
It is also useful to identify your most business-critical ecommerce processes.
For a B2B company these might include customer-specific pricing reaching the website correctly, orders entering the ERP, trade customers purchasing on account and inventory remaining synchronised.
Tell the incoming agency about the things that cannot be allowed to fail.
This helps its team prioritise the handover and monitoring accordingly.
Don't forget the commercial relationship
Choosing a new ecommerce agency should not be based on technical credentials alone.
You are potentially going to work with this company every week for several years, meaning communication, transparency and cultural fit matter.
Meet the people who will actually manage your account. Understand how meetings work, how projects are scoped and how the agency communicates when something goes wrong.
Find out whether senior technical expertise is available when difficult decisions need to be made.
You should feel confident that the agency will tell you when it believes an idea is unnecessarily expensive, technically risky or unlikely to produce sufficient value.
How long should changing Magento agency take?
The priority should be reducing risk rather than completing the handover in an arbitrary number of days.
Allow enough time for access to be transferred, documentation to be reviewed, technical discovery to take place and critical dependencies to be understood.
If possible, avoid making the transition immediately before your busiest trading period or a major ecommerce launch.
Should you tell your existing agency that you are moving?
Once you have made your decision and are ready to proceed, a professional, structured handover is usually in everyone’s best interests.
Your outgoing agency possesses valuable knowledge about the platform.
Giving it the opportunity to provide documentation, explain unusual technical decisions and transfer access can significantly reduce risk.
Your new agency should be comfortable collaborating professionally with the outgoing team during the transition.
Changing agency does not need to become a blame exercise and the objective should be for continuity for your customers and your business.
Red flags when choosing a new Magento support agency
The right agency should be able to explain how it will get to know your platform, manage the transition and support your wider ecommerce objectives.
Be cautious if an agency:
- Wants to start development without understanding the existing platform – making changes before reviewing the codebase, integrations, infrastructure and existing functionality can introduce new problems and means development decisions are being made without sufficient context.
- Immediately recommends rebuilding everything – there may be circumstances where a rebuild or replatform is justified, but that conclusion should follow proper discovery. An agency recommending one before understanding your existing store may be overlooking opportunities to improve what you already have.
- Cannot provide relevant Magento or Adobe Commerce examples – general ecommerce experience is not necessarily enough. You should be confident that the agency has practical experience of the platform your business relies on and understands its particular technical requirements.
- Has limited experience of taking over existing ecommerce stores – inheriting another agency’s work is different from developing a new store. The team needs to be comfortable investigating unfamiliar code, undocumented functionality and previous technical decisions without disrupting a live ecommerce operation.
- Cannot demonstrate relevant B2B expertise where you require it – if B2B ecommerce is an important part of your business, the agency should understand requirements such as company accounts, customer-specific pricing, credit purchasing, complex catalogues, approval processes and ERP integrations.
- Has little integration experience – integrations often connect the ecommerce platform with business-critical systems. Limited experience in this area can create problems with product information, pricing, stock, customer data, orders and fulfilment.
- Cannot clearly explain who will manage your account – you should know who your day-to-day contact will be, who is responsible for prioritising work and how you will access senior technical expertise when it is needed.
- Provides no clear escalation route – when a business-critical problem occurs, you need to know how it will be reported, who will take ownership and how urgent issues will be prioritised. This should be clear before you sign a support contract, not discovered during an emergency.
- Is vague about security and upgrades – security patches, platform upgrades and ongoing technical maintenance should form part of a structured approach to keeping your ecommerce store healthy, rather than only being addressed when they become urgent.
- Cannot explain how development work is prioritised – without a clear process for assessing urgency, commercial value, customer impact and technical dependencies, your development budget can easily be consumed by whichever request happens to be raised next.
- Focuses entirely on completing tickets rather than your business objectives – an effective ecommerce partner should understand what you are trying to achieve commercially and help determine the best way to get there, rather than treating success simply as closing as many development tickets as possible.
A transition is an opportunity to improve your ecommerce operation. You should be confident that the new agency is capable of doing more than reproducing the relationship you are leaving.
Changing Magento support agency: your handover checklist
Before your existing contract ends, make sure the transition covers:
- Contract and notice requirements
- Website administration access
- Source-code ownership and repository access
- Hosting and server access where applicable
- Backup and disaster recovery arrangements
- Domain and DNS ownership
- Development and staging environments
- Deployment processes
- Third-party licences
- Payment platforms
- Analytics and tracking
- ERP, PIM, CRM, OMS and WMS integrations
- API credentials and integration documentation
- Extension and module ownership
- Existing technical documentation
- Current development backlog
- Known bugs and technical issues
- Security and upgrade status
- Monitoring and alerting
- Current projects and deadlines
- Important seasonal trading dates
- Key internal and external contacts
It is also important for the incoming agency to review and revoke access that is no longer required by the previous agency.
This could cover:
- Removing unnecessary administrator accounts.
- Revoking former agency access to hosting and repositories.
- Rotating shared passwords, API credentials and SSH keys where appropriate.
- Reviewing third-party integrations and application permissions.
- Confirming that monitoring and security notifications reach the correct people.
Importantly, credentials should be rotated in a coordinated way to avoid breaking live integrations.
Once these areas are accounted for, the new agency has a much stronger foundation from which to take responsibility for the platform.
Ready to change Magento support agency?
If your current ecommerce support arrangement is no longer giving your business the technical expertise, responsiveness or strategic support it needs, Fluid Commerce can help.
We specialise in supporting B2B and D2C businesses using Magento Open Source and Adobe Commerce, including taking over established ecommerce stores developed and supported by other agencies.
Whether you are looking for ongoing Magento developer support, a new Magento support partner or specialist Adobe Commerce expertise, we’ll take the time to understand your existing platform, integrations, technical challenges and commercial priorities.
We can then help you plan a structured transition that minimises disruption to your business.
Thinking about moving your ecommerce support contract? Get in touch with Fluid Commerce to discuss your current setup and what you need from your next ecommerce agency.
