Who Gets Into Your Shopify Admin, and With What Access

Your developer asks to be made an admin. Your bookkeeper wants to see payouts. The assistant who processes orders is asking why she cannot print shipping labels. Each of those is the same decision wearing different clothes: which door you open, and how wide.

Shopify gives you two doors into the admin — a staff seat, which spends a place on your plan, and a collaborator account, which a Shopify Partner requests and which spends nothing — plus a POS-only lane for counter staff who never enter the admin at all. Behind both admin doors sits a store-permission system of nineteen categories. This guide is about choosing the door and setting the width. Everything here is read off Shopify's own documentation, as of August 2026.

The Quick Verdict

Find your own case in column one — everything after this table is the evidence underneath it. The two mechanisms named in column two, a staff seat and a collaborator account, are defined in the section that follows.

Two Ways In, and They Are Not the Same Door

The request almost always arrives in the wrong shape. "Can you make me an admin?" describes a level of power, not a mechanism — and the mechanism is the part that decides what is even possible. Before you decide how much to give, decide which of the two accounts you are creating.

What a staff seat actually is

A staff seat begins with an invitation to an email address. The person creates their own login, you attach a role to it, and the account occupies one of the user slots your plan includes. It is the mechanism for everyone on your side of the business: employees, a virtual assistant, a warehouse packer, a bookkeeper you pay monthly.

One detail catches people out at the very start. Invitations to create a staff login expire in seven days, and an expired invitation is not re-sent on request: Shopify's instruction is to remove the user and add them again to trigger a new one. If your new hire starts in three weeks, send the invitation nearer the date.

What a collaborator account is

A collaborator account works the other way round: the person asks you. Collaborators are Shopify Partners you have allowed into your store, and requesting that access requires a Shopify Partner account. They log in from their Partner Dashboard rather than through your store's login page — and after that first Dashboard login, from the Shopify mobile app too.

The request code is the part that gives you control. You generate a code and share it only with the agency or freelancer you are hiring, and only Partners holding that code can ask for access to your store. If the code has been passed around, you generate a new one and every old code stops working. Nothing about this involves handing over your own password.

Security is not optional on that side of the door, which is the one place Shopify is blunt about a requirement rather than a recommendation.

Read the boundary of that carefully, because it is widely misquoted. Two-step authentication is a condition of the collaborator mechanism itself, and Shopify attaches no plan requirement to it. Forcing a secure sign-in method across every user in an organization is a different feature, and that one is limited to Shopify Plus. For ordinary staff, Shopify's wording is that you can encourage them to turn it on — the full picture is in our answer on whether Shopify requires two-step authentication.

The differences that actually decide it

None of the nine rows below is a matter of preference: no permission setting anywhere in your admin will change any of them.

Both sides read on Shopify's collaborator accounts and user limits pages, August 6, 2026. Removal removes the account, not the history: Shopify states that a removed collaborator's name and actions remain in timelines such as the store activity log.

What Your Plan Actually Lets You Do

Merchants tend to collapse these into one question and then optimise the wrong thing — refining a role they cannot create, or upgrading a plan when the person did not need a seat in the first place. They are different gates, and you hit them in order.

Gate 1: does your plan include user seats?

The seat count is published as a plain table, and users are available only on the Grow plan and higher. You check your own position in Settings → Users; if the plan is Basic or Starter, Shopify's own instruction is to upgrade to Grow, Advanced or Plus.

Shopify Help Center, user limits by plan, read August 6, 2026. These counts are additional user accounts — the store owner is exempt and never occupies one.

Downgrading has its own logic worth knowing before you plan a move: when a plan change reduces your seats, Shopify suspends pending users first, starting with the most recently invited, and then active users by how long they have been inactive. What a seat costs, and where the upgrade sits against the rest of your invoice, belongs to our breakdown of the fees the pricing page underplays.

Gate 2: which roles you are allowed to use

Passing the first gate does not hand you the whole role system. A second set of conditions decides what you can build once you have someone to build it for — and this is the one people discover halfway through a permission plan.

Shopify Help Center — role categories, migrate to roles, and user limits by plan, read August 6, 2026.

Two of those rows have owners elsewhere, and Organization-level permissions have a reference page of their own. Directory-driven provisioning — SCIM, and the single sign-on setup that usually comes with it — is Plus territory and part of the wider enterprise picture we cover in the B2B on Shopify Plus guide. The POS row has a subscription behind it rather than a plan: POS roles and POS-only staff need the Point of Sale channel and at least one location on a POS Pro subscription.

Which Door Is Yours?

The verdict table sorts people by job. That is the right first cut, but it assumes every lane is open to you, and often one is not. The quiz below answers the other question — not who they are, but which mechanism your own situation still allows. Five questions, about a minute, and no wrong answers: every route it returns is a legitimate way to let someone in.

How Shopify Permissions Are Actually Organized

Once the door is chosen, the width is a matter of ticking boxes — but the boxes are arranged in a way that rewards five minutes of orientation. Two structural rules and one long list cover almost everything you will need.

Roles, categories, and the rule that trips people up

There are four role categories — Store, Organization, Point of sale and Partner — and each represents a different business context. The rule that surprises people is that a role can hold only one category: you cannot build a single role mixing store permissions with organization ones. You can, however, assign roles from different categories to the same person, where more than one category is available to you.

Organization roles grant access to organization features across every store in the organization, but they do not conjure accounts: Shopify notes that staff accounts must still be created for each store before anyone can get into it. Store roles work the other way, granting access to one store — or to several, when the stores belong to the same organization.

The 19 categories, and what to watch for in each

Shopify groups store permissions into 19 categories. Reading the list end to end is not the point — the third column is. It carries the boundary inside each category that determines whether the role you build does what you think it does.

Shopify Help Center, store permissions, read August 6, 2026. Permission counts are ours: one row of Shopify's tables counts as one permission.

Adding those up gives 110 individual permissions — 108 across the nineteen store categories plus two app permissions — but treat that as our count, not a Shopify figure: Shopify publishes the categories and the descriptions, never a total. POS permissions sit outside it entirely, because they are managed through organization roles rather than store permissions.

Narrowing access to specific apps and channels

Apps are governed by two permissions of their own: Manage and install apps and channels, which lets someone add, access or delete apps, and Approve app charges, which is separately required to install anything that starts as a free trial and turns into a paid subscription.

The narrowing is the useful part. If you check specific apps and sales channels when granting access, the person can only reach those apps and channels, and cannot install or delete apps. That is the setting behind "give the email agency Klaviyo and nothing else", and it works for collaborators and staff alike.

Building custom apps is a third thing again. It lives under App development, custom app development is not permitted by default, and enabling it also requires the app management permission — a deliberate double lock rather than an oversight.

Why your admin does not match older guides

If the screenshots you find online show a flat list of checkboxes attached to a person, they predate the current model. Shopify moved to a new model and set a deadline for the old one.

Three dates explain almost every discrepancy between a guide you find and the screen in front of you.

The middle event is the one that shows up in real stores: if you have inherited a shop with roles named after nobody in particular, that is the automatic conversion, which generated a role for each unique set of permissions rather than trying to guess your intent.

What to Give Each Kind of Helper

The verdict table answered which door each person goes through. This section answers the other half of the decision — how wide to open it, and which single permission you would regret handing over. Shopify publishes fewer templates for that than merchants expect: two examples of a custom role you can build, plus one predefined role that already exists in your admin. A third block on the same page is not a template at all — it is there to say that for a collaborator you do not build a role in advance, because the Partner asks for the permissions and you approve the request.

Columns two and three follow Shopify's published examples where the fourth column says so; the remaining rows are our reading of the permission descriptions, marked as such.

The assistant who works your orders

There is a role for this already. Customer support is one of Shopify's predefined roles, and its contents are published exactly: Home, all permissions in Orders, and all permissions in Draft orders. For an assistant whose job is processing what comes in, that is a one-click answer.

The word doing the work there is all. Every Orders permission includes refunding, cancelling and exporting. If that is more than you want, Shopify says you can edit or delete predefined roles, so Customer support can be adjusted rather than treated as fixed — and the plan gate above still matters, since the store roles Shopify manages and the custom ones you build are both named as unavailable on Basic and Starter.

One thing you will not find is a named template for this job under the label merchants actually use. No official page we have found publishes a role template for a "virtual assistant" — the surfaces we read are listed in the box above. Customer support is the closest published thing, and the rest is your own combination.

The bookkeeper who reconciles payouts

This one Shopify does describe, and the description is worth reading before you build the role, because it defines the job in terms of what the person reads rather than what they change.

The combination Shopify publishes for that role is short:

• Home
• Finance permissions to view payouts and billing
• Analytics permissions to view reports
• View and export access to Orders, without the ability to edit, refund or cancel them

One boundary travels with it. Finance permissions are store-level: if your store is part of an organization, organization-level billing access is managed with the Billing organization permissions instead. For Plus merchants it goes further — payment settings move to organization roles as well, and the store-level finance permissions stop applying. Check which of the two worlds you are in before you promise your accountant anything.

This is access to your admin, which is a different question from how your sales end up in your books. Nothing here covers reconciling ledgers, syncing invoices or picking a bookkeeping tool — the role above simply lets a person read the numbers where they already live. That other half, from the payout-versus-order decision to what a connector actually moves, is covered in our guide to Shopify accounting.

The agency or freelancer working on your theme

For a Partner you do not build a role at all. The request arrives with an auto-generated role built from the permissions they asked for, named along the lines of Collaborator name x Store name, and you can rename it. Your job is reviewing the request, not designing it — and the Finance ticks in that request are the ones that decide whether the agency sees your payouts. Shopify's advice to merchants on how to review it is unusually direct: "Give only the permissions that you feel comfortable giving. If a freelancer or agency asks for certain permissions, then there might be a good reason. If you aren't sure, then ask the freelancer or agency why they need the permissions."

The request screen may show you some context about the Partner — how long they have been a Partner, how many active collaborations they have, where they signed up from — but Shopify is careful to say those details might be displayed rather than will be, and that they do not guarantee identity, work quality or intent. Judging the firm itself is a separate exercise, and our guide to hiring a Shopify developer covers the vetting side.

Ask one question before the work starts, because the documentation does not answer it for you. No page we have found describes what happens to an installed app, or to a custom app's API access, when the account that installed or created it is removed from the store — the surfaces we read are in the box above. If your developer is building a custom app, agree in advance who owns it and how it keeps running after the engagement ends.

The contractor you need for a few weeks

Here the documentation runs out, and it is worth being explicit about where our advice starts. No official page we have found names a "temporary contractor" arrangement or a time-limited staff account, and the surfaces we read are listed above. What exists are two separate documented facts, and the recommendation below is ours, assembled from them. Shopify does go one step in this direction: its collaborator example says to grant access for the scope of the project and remove the collaborator account from your store when the work is done.

The first is that a collaborator request code is under your control: only Partners you share it with can ask for access, and generating a new code kills the old ones. The second is that a collaborator's access expires after 90 days without a login. Put together, that is the closest thing Shopify has to access with a built-in end date — which is why, when the short-term helper is a Partner, we would route them through a collaborator account rather than a seat.

When they are not a Partner, read the mechanics carefully. The seven-day expiry applies to the invitation, not to the access it creates — accepting it produces an ordinary staff account, while the inactivity expiry Shopify documents is the collaborator one. For a fixed engagement, put the end date in your calendar and treat the removal as a scheduled task rather than something you will notice.

What a Staffer Without Finance Permissions Still Sees

Shopify does not publish a page called "what your staff can still see", so the section below is assembled from the permission descriptions themselves rather than quoted from a single source. Every individual fact in it is Shopify's; the picture they add up to is ours.

The boundaries that surprise people

There is a plan-shaped boundary underneath all of them. Finance permissions are store-level: if your store is part of an organization, organization-level billing access is managed with the Billing organization permissions instead, and for Plus merchants billing and payment settings are managed at the organization level entirely, with the store-level finance permissions not applying.

B2B stores have one more. The Companies category includes a restriction that limits a user to their assigned company locations — but Shopify is precise about how far it reaches: it filters only Orders, Draft orders, Customers and Companies, and all other pages in the admin are not filtered by company. Even inside those four pages the filter is not total: some customer values, such as Amount spent, still show totals for all locations. Alongside it, you can assign up to 10 sales staff to each company location, and the same person can be assigned to several. Shopify says that staff who had Customers permissions before January 31, 2024 were automatically granted Companies permissions, because Companies permissions were previously part of Customers permissions.

Which permissions Shopify calls sensitive — and where its own pages disagree

Shopify marks some permissions as sensitive, which is a useful shortcut when you are reviewing a role in a hurry. It is also the one place in this topic where two live official pages tell you different things, so it is worth seeing both.

Its dedicated sensitive permissions page tabulates six across the Store, Organization and Partner categories, and lists one more — Store settings > Manage other payment settings — for the Point of Sale channel underneath the table. The store permissions page, read the same day, describes two further permissions with the same sentence — "This is a sensitive permission" — that the six-row table does not include.

Both pages read on August 6, 2026, and re-read to rule out a stale cache. The two highlighted rows are the disagreement: flagged in their own descriptions, absent from the dedicated table.

What to do while the two pages disagree: read the description of the permission on the page where you are actually ticking the box, because that is where Shopify writes the warning next to the setting itself. Treating the wider list as sensitive is the cheaper mistake — a permission you withhold can be granted in a minute, and one that quietly exposed tax documents cannot be un-granted retroactively.

Can you give someone one report instead of an account?

It is the natural instinct — the accountant needs a number, not the keys — and the honest answer is that nothing in the documented permission system is shaped that way. No official page we have found describes handing someone a report or an export instead of giving them an account; the surfaces we read are listed in the box above. Every export path we read assumes the person pressing Export already has a role that allows it.

The permission system pushes the same way. Analytics cannot be narrowed to a single report, and any store staff with the Analytics permissions can access the reports you create, as well as duplicate and modify them. A reporting-shaped role is therefore a whole-reporting-surface role.

What you can do instead is narrow the role to the Export permission that matches the job, and let the person pull the file. One boundary comes with that: exporting up to 50 orders downloads the CSV to the device, while exporting more than 51 orders, or exporting by date, emails the file to the person who asked and to the store owner. Customer exports behave the same way: over the threshold they are emailed, and if the person is not the store owner, a copy goes to the owner as well.

Who Can Hand Out Access at All

For single stores not on the Shopify Plus plan, the list is two entries long: the store owner, and users with the Administrator store role. For organizations and Plus stores it becomes four — the organization owner, the store owner, users with the Organization administrator role and users with the Store user administrator role. POS staff are managed separately again, by the store owner, the organization owner and the POS user administrator role, and only for locations on POS Pro.

Delegating user management does not delegate everything. The Administrator role explicitly cannot perform ownership changes, and the Store user administrator role is narrower still: it cannot create or edit roles, delete users from an organization, assign organization-level roles, manage groups or suspend users. And six things belong to the owner account alone, whatever anyone's role says.

The same logic explains a collaborator limit that otherwise looks arbitrary. A collaborator cannot hold the Administrator role and cannot receive store ownership — not because you forgot a checkbox, but because the account type is built that way.

When the Person Leaves

This is where the documentation is thinnest. No official page we have found gathers the steps for revoking access into a single checklist — the mechanics are documented in pieces across the pages listed in the box above, and the word offboarding does not appear on them. The list below is assembled from those pieces, which is exactly why it is worth having in one place.

Deactivate or remove: they are not the same

Deactivating a user stops them logging into your store and can be reversed later — the right move for a leave of absence, a suspended contract, or freeing a seat you may want back. Removing is permanent, cannot be undone, and asks you to enter the password of the account you are signed in with before it will proceed.

Two side effects are worth checking before you choose. If the person is a Shopify Credit secondary cardholder, deactivating them locks their active cards while removing them cancels the cards outright. And removal deletes the account, not the record: a removed collaborator's name and actions remain in relevant timelines, such as the store activity log and order timelines.

Your access-revocation checklist

Work through it on the day the engagement ends rather than the week after. If you are picking up a store somebody else ran, the same steps apply, but the wider sweep — old apps, leftover code, orphaned integrations — belongs to our store code audit walkthrough, which treats inherited access as one item on a longer list.

The 90-day timer deserves one last word, because it is easy to lean on. Shopify's own framing is sequential: remove the account when you no longer need the collaborator, and otherwise access expires after 90 days without a login. It is what catches the account you forgot, not the process you should be running.

The Bottom Line

Most of the anxiety around this topic comes from treating it as a security question, when it is really a clarity question. You are not deciding whether to trust the person — you are deciding which of two accounts fits the work, and which of nineteen store categories that work actually touches.

Frequently Asked Questions