Magento was designed for large retailers with dedicated engineering teams β deployments, reindexing, cache warming, and a release cycle that assumes someone technical is watching it full-time. Most small and mid-sized businesses running Magento today didn't choose that complexity on purpose. They hired an agency to build the store years ago, and the agency chose Magento because it was capable of anything the brief could ask for.
The business is still paying for that decision, usually as an ongoing developer retainer that mostly covers patching and keeping the lights on β not building anything new.
Security Patching Isn't Optional Here
Magento's size and market share have made it a long-running, well-documented target for attackers β Magecart-style payment-skimming attacks specifically look for unpatched Magento checkouts, and new exploits get published against old versions regularly. Falling behind on updates on this platform isn't just technical debt β it's a live security exposure sitting on the same pages that take customer payment details.
A platform that requires a standing engineering relationship just to stay safe was never really built for a business this size.
Migrating Out Means Touching Infrastructure You Didn't Build
Getting product data out of Magento in bulk traditionally means either a developer running database queries directly, or navigating its REST/GraphQL Admin API β powerful, but not something a business owner is meant to touch directly. If the original agency has moved on, that knowledge often leaves with them, and you're paying a new developer just to understand the old one's setup before any migration work can start.
How Mika Store Handles This
Magento actually makes one part of this easier than it looks: from System β Extensions β Integrations in your own admin, you can create and activate an Integration yourself and get a permanent Access Token β no developer required for this specific step.
Paste your store URL and that token into Mika Store or Mika Sell's Integrations page, and Mika pulls your catalog directly through Magento's own REST API β products, categories, and configurable-product variants (Size, Colour, and any other option set) mapped onto Mika's real sellable-variant system, keeping the same picker experience your customers already know.
You'll see an exact preview β products, variants, and categories counted β before anything commits to your live store, and nothing is created twice on a re-run.
You shouldn't need a standing engineering team just to keep selling. Moving off the platform that required one is often the actual fix β not another retainer.