What questions should we ask a migration agency specifically about their subscription-migration track record before trusting them with an active subscriber base?
Ask a migration agency 3 questions: the subscriber count of their last three subscription migrations, the payment-method transfer rate achieved on each, and the name of the destination platform. Vague answers to those three are disqualifying. Agencies that have really done this will also volunteer the parallel-run length and who handled the support surge, because both are where the work actually lives.
The seven questions, in the order they filter
- "How many active subscribers were on your last three subscription migrations, and to which platforms?" Counts and platform names. An agency that has done this remembers both. Generic replatform experience is not the same credential.
- "What payment-method transfer rate did you achieve, and how did you measure it?" The measurement method matters as much as the number. Contracts moved is not payment methods moved.
- "Was the card vault processor-held or platform-held on those projects?" This is the technical question that reveals whether they understand the risk or just executed someone else's runbook.
- "How long was the parallel billing run, and how did you de-duplicate subscriber emails and billing dates across it?" A 2–4 week parallel run with explicit de-duplication is the pattern. An agency that has not run one will not have an answer to the de-duplication half.
- "What did you do about contracts created between the export snapshot and cutover?" You are listening for "delta sync." If the answer is "we paused sign-ups," you have learned their default.
- "Who handled the support surge, and for how long?" Agencies that have lived through a subscription cutover talk about this unprompted. Agencies that have not will treat it as your problem.
- "What went wrong on the last one, and what did it cost to fix?" Any agency with three real migrations has a story. An agency with no story has no migrations.
Reference calls, specifically. Ask for a reference from a subscription migration, not from a replatform. Ask that reference one question: what surprised you? The answer is almost always a contract field, a gateway constraint, or a support volume nobody planned for. And which of the three it was tells you where that agency's blind spot is.
What is not a credential. Platform partner tiers, total projects delivered, and the number of Shopify stores launched are all real achievements that say nothing about whether an agency has moved live billing relationships. Subscription migration is a narrow discipline inside a broad one.
A scope test that costs nothing. Ask for a one-page migration runbook before signing, covering export, mapping, delta sync, parallel run, reconciliation and rollback. An agency that has done this can produce it in a day from a template. An agency that has not will send a Gantt chart.
The Deploi point of view
Our own position, from building on Shopify. Separate from the facts above.
- Our take: The disqualifying answer is not "we have not done many." It is an agency that cannot name the card-vault question. The first is honest; the second means they do not know where the risk is.
- What we’ve seen: Migration scopes that omit reconciliation and rollback are the norm, not the exception. Both get added later, at a worse moment, for more money.
- Where we disagree: Procurement usually weights total migration volume. For subscriptions, we would weight one well-documented migration at your subscriber scale above twenty generic replatforms.
- What this page adds: the specific questions, and which answers are disqualifying rather than merely weak.
Reviewed by Martin Dejnicki, Director of SEO & AI Search. Facts verified 2026-09-13.