The brief
A growing UK retail brand had a new Shopify website, built and set up by a delivery partner. It was early days: the site showed the brand off but didn't sell online yet. As the business grew, it needed to own its store outright, with the delivery partner staying on to help rather than holding the keys.
I was brought in by a retail technology consultancy for a short, focused piece of work: move the store into the brand's ownership safely, without breaking anything or locking anyone out.
My process
Discovery. I found out who owned what: the store, the accounts with access to it, and where the website's code was kept. That turned up something important: the code sat in the delivery partner's own account, not the brand's.
Plan. I recommended that the store be owned through a shared, role-based business account, not through any one person's login, so ownership doesn't walk out of the door when someone changes job. The delivery partner would stay on as a collaborator. There was some healthy debate about this, and in the end everyone agreed to it.
Build. I wrote a step-by-step handover plan and worked through it in stages: tidying up old test stores, starting and accepting the transfer, restoring the delivery team's access, and checking everything afterwards. Once we knew where the code lived, I added a stage to move it into a private account owned by the brand, with the right people given access.
Testing. After each stage, I checked that ownership, access and the code were exactly where they should be before moving on.
Handover. Partway through, the work grew from advice into hands-on Shopify delivery, and later someone else took over part of the account set-up. I handed that part over with my notes, and made sure the decisions on ownership and the risks I'd spotted were written down.
What I delivered
- A clear ownership model: the brand owns the store, and its partner helps run it
- A staged handover plan, carried out and checked
- The website's code moved into the brand's own private account
- Advice on the right Shopify plan for now, and when it would need to change
The outcome
The work was completed in June 2026. The brand now owns its Shopify store and its code through a business account rather than a personal one, the delivery partner keeps the access it needs, and the ownership approach I recommended was adopted by everyone involved.
