Why generalist agencies overprice Plus migrations by 3×, and the seven-week playbook we use to ship them faster, safer, and with no SEO loss.
A founder forwarded me a quote last month. £82,400 to migrate a 4,200-SKU Magento 1 store to Shopify Plus. Eleven weeks. Fifty-page Statement of Work. The kind of document that's designed to feel reassuring.
It wasn't reassuring. It was the same migration we'd quoted three weeks earlier at £28,500 over seven weeks. Same scope. Same theme complexity. Same data volume. Same client.
The agency that sent the £82k quote isn't a scam. They're a respectable London firm with sixty staff and a portfolio that includes one or two recognisable names. Their problem isn't competence. Their problem is shape.
They charge £160/hr blended. They allocate a producer, an account director, a strategist, two engineers, a QA lead, and a "head of solutions architecture" — which is what agencies call a sales engineer. Half those roles aren't doing migration work. They're doing agency work.
A migration is not a strategy project. It's a logistics project. You need two engineers, one project lead, and a redirect spreadsheet. Everything else is overhead.
Three reasons, in order of severity:
Strip the SOW down to the work that actually has to happen and you're left with five things:
Two senior engineers full-time for seven weeks at our £85/hr rate is £23,800. Add project management, QA, and a buffer and you're at £28,500. That's the actual price.
Borrowed in spirit from how data migration teams actually work — not how agencies pretend to.
[ FULL PLAYBOOK CONTINUES — see the Fashion Studios case study for an end-to-end worked example ]
