How to let someone work on your Shopify store without handing over the keys

Sharing your password is the one thing not to do

It is the most common way small merchants give access and it is worse than it looks, for reasons that have nothing to do with trust.

Everything done under your login is recorded as done by you. If something breaks, there is no way to tell from the store's own history whether it was you, a contractor from eight months ago, or an app. The audit trail that would answer the question in ten seconds no longer exists.

It also cannot be undone cleanly. Revoking a shared password means changing your own password, which signs you out everywhere and breaks anything else using it. Compare that with removing a staff member, which takes one click and affects nobody else.

And it defeats two-factor authentication, because either you disable it or you end up forwarding codes to someone, which is worse. Anyone who asks for your password rather than an invitation is telling you something about how they work.

The alternative takes about ninety seconds and Shopify built it for exactly this.

Staff accounts versus collaborator accounts

There are two right answers and which one applies depends on who you are hiring.

A staff account is for a person. In Settings, then Users, you send an invitation to their email address and choose what they can see. It consumes one of your plan's staff seats, so on a Basic plan, where those are limited, they are worth spending carefully.

A collaborator account is for an agency or freelancer you have hired. They request access through Shopify, you approve it, and it does not use a staff seat at all. You can also set a collaborator request code so that only people you have given the code to can even ask. This is usually the better option for hired help, and if someone works on Shopify stores professionally and cannot request collaborator access, that in itself is worth a question.

Either way, the permissions are the point. Grant what the job needs and nothing else. Someone fixing product data needs Products, and probably Online Store and Themes. They do not need Finances, they do not need Settings, and they very rarely need full Customers access, which exposes the personal information of every person who has ever bought from you.

The temptation is to grant everything because working out permissions is tedious and the person seems fine. Resist it on the narrow grounds that a smaller grant limits the damage from an honest mistake, which is a far more likely event than anyone acting in bad faith.

What to do before, during and after

Before you grant anything, turn on two-factor authentication on your own account if it is not on already. It is the single highest-value thing on this page and it takes two minutes. Then decide what the work actually touches, and write it down, because that list is your permission set.

While the work is happening, ask for changes to be made in a way you can see. A theme edit should happen on a duplicated theme and get previewed before it goes live, not directly on the published one. Anyone experienced will suggest this before you do.

Afterwards, two things. Remove access that is no longer needed, which is the step everyone skips, so a store that has been running five years accumulates a list of people nobody recognises. And look at the store's activity log, under Settings then Users, then the person's name, which shows what was actually done under that account.

If you are ever unsure mid-project, you can revoke access instantly and nothing you own is affected. That asymmetry is the whole reason to use proper accounts: the reversible option costs ninety seconds to set up, and the irreversible one costs a password reset and a permanent hole in your history.