I’m a Shopify Partner working closely with a specific merchant organization. The goal is to collaborate on app development within their Dev Dashboard — creating dev stores, building and managing apps, etc.
The problem: as a Partner, I have my own org and Dev Dashboard. Collaborator accounts don’t have access to the Dev Dashboard, so the standard Partner → merchant access flow doesn’t work here.
The options I’ve found so far:
Separate staff account (different email) — works, but means managing two Shopify accounts.
Merchant creates a Partner account — cleanest, but adds overhead for a non-technical merchant.
Build in my own Partner org — the merchant installs the draft app on their store, but then they need to create their own custom app for any single-store tooling and hand me the token manually. Not good for very simple app needed only for access to the specific token.
Is there a cleaner workflow for this kind of Partner + merchant relationship? Would love to hear how others handle it. If not, would this be considered in the future to make it easier for clients to build such simple apps?
P.S. I have similar issue with new Rollouts app (at least I think so, not granted access).
Hey @lynthius, it’s currently only possible to access a merchants dev dashboard through a staff account.
For partners working with merchants on custom apps option 3 would be best. The reason for this is you can actually create a custom app in your partner organization and then share that install URL with your client. That saves them having to go in to their dev dashboard to set up an app and pass on the secrets you need to authenticate.
Option 3 makes sense and I’ll go with that approach. However, I wanted to raise a practical concern — when a Partner works with multiple merchants on simple, single-store integrations (e.g. apps that only exist to obtain an access token with a specific scope), the Partner org quickly gets cluttered with many trivial custom apps. It becomes messy to manage.
Is there any consideration on Shopify’s side to allow granting a collaborator (Shopify Partner) independent access to the merchant’s Dev Dashboard — separately from the Partner’s own org? Or is there a fundamental technical limitation preventing that?
It would simplify the workflow significantly, especially for Partners who maintain ongoing relationships with merchants and need lightweight access without spinning up a full custom app each time.
Hey @lynthius, I think that’s a valid concern and I can see the use case for sure for both the merchant and partners.
I’m not aware of fundamental technical limitations here. The addition of role based access for partners does bring this more in alignmment with merchant access as well.
I’ll be sure to pass this feedback on your behalf as a feature request.