Six roles built for a store, plus custom roles of your own. Each decides which rooms and categories a person can see, entirely separately from whether they have a Shopify staff account.
"Give them access" usually means one of two things, with quite different consequences.
A Shopify staff account is access to your store's admin: viewing orders, editing products, issuing refunds. That is access to the business itself, and order records generally carry customer names, addresses and contact details.
A workspace role is access to coordination. Knowing what is launching, being assigned work, seeing the alerts relevant to the job.
Most over-permissioning happens because these get treated as one decision. Someone needs to be kept informed, so they are given a staff account, because that was how the request was phrased.
Seasonal staff. Six weeks in November. They need what their shift requires, not the room where a customer complaint is being discussed. Scoping should be the easy path, because under time pressure nobody takes the diligent one.
Virtual assistants. Often need to look up orders, rarely need anything else. The scope should follow the five things they actually do this month, not what might be convenient later.
Agencies and freelancers. A room for the engagement rather than a seat in your general workspace. The general room is where the most incidental information about how your business runs accumulates, and it is the one contractors get added to without anyone thinking about it.
Granting access has a forcing function: someone cannot start work. Removing it has none. Nothing breaks, nobody is blocked, and no customer complains, so it gets deferred until a contractor who did one project still has access eighteen months later.
Roles make the removal a single change rather than an audit. What makes it actually happen is agreeing the end date when access is granted, which turns revocation from a judgement about a person into a policy that applies to everyone.
Manager, Staff, Fulfillment, Virtual Assistant and Developer as built-in roles, plus custom roles you define. Each controls which rooms and categories the person can see.
Yes. Team members are invited by email and given a role. They can participate fully, receive tasks and see alerts without being able to sign in to your admin.
Yes. A private room is closed but visible, so people know it exists and can ask. A private category is invisible to anyone outside it, for the narrow case where the existence of the conversation is the sensitive part.
Create a room for the engagement and give them a role scoped to it. Rooms named for a piece of work have a natural close-out point, which rooms named for a person do not.
Their access ends and the conversation stays. History remains searchable for whoever takes over, which is the opposite of what happens when the record lives in a personal messaging account.
Free for teams up to five, and about two minutes to connect your store.