Your Shopify plan gives you zero staff accounts. Now what?

You are on Basic, you have a few hundred products that need fixing, and you want to hand that work to someone else. Shopify's Basic plan allows 0 staff users. These are the options that actually exist, and what each one really costs you.

This trips people up because "add staff" is visible in the admin, so it looks available until you try. The limit is a plan feature, not a bug:

Collaborator accounts are the exception — they do not count toward the limit, on any plan. That matters, and we come back to it below.

Option 1 — Move up to Grow

The direct fix. You get five staff users and full granular permissions: you really can give someone Products → Create and edit and nothing else, so they never see an order or a customer record.

Worth it if you need someone in the admin continuously. Expensive if what you actually need is one person for two weeks to clean up product titles — you are paying a monthly platform upgrade for a temporary job.

Option 2 — A collaborator account

Collaborator accounts do not count against your staff limit, and they support the same granular permissions. This is the option most merchants miss.

The catch: collaborator accounts are designed for Shopify Partners — agencies, developers, freelancers who have registered a Partner account. Your supplier or a short-term data-entry hire generally is not one, and asking them to become one to fix some SKUs is a strange request.

Option 3 — Share your own login

Do not. It hands over your payouts, your customer records, your app installs and your ability to change the password. There is no audit trail: everything they do is recorded as you. If the relationship ends badly you have no clean way to revoke access other than changing the password and hoping nothing else was set up in the meantime.

It is worth being blunt because this is what a lot of people quietly do when the first two options do not fit.

Option 4 — CSV export and import

Export the products, send the file, get it back, import it. No account needed for the person doing the work, which is why Shopify's own support recommends it.

What it costs you: you are editing blind. A CSV import tells you nothing until it runs, and when it fails it fails per-row with messages that are hard to trace back to what you typed. There is no preview of what will change and no undo — if the file was wrong, the fix is another import that you also cannot preview. On a few hundred rows that is a bad afternoon. On a few thousand it is worse.

Option 5 — Work in a spreadsheet, keep the store to yourself

The shape of the problem is that editing product data and having access to a store are two different things, and Shopify's admin ties them together because that is where the editing happens.

If the editing happens somewhere else — a spreadsheet — they come apart. The person doing the work needs access to a spreadsheet, not to your store. You keep the store credentials, you review what changed before anything is written, and you can put it all back if it was wrong.

That is what Storesheet does: it pulls your catalog into a Google Sheet, your credentials stay attached to your Google account rather than inside the file, and you can share that file with anyone. They fill down, find and replace, paste a column from a supplier's price list. When you push, you see exactly which cells will change before anything is sent, every write is read back from Shopify and checked, and one click puts the old values back.

It has a free tier that writes 200 rows per push, which is enough to do a real job before deciding anything.

Choosing between them

Staff limits per plan are documented by Shopify in "Maximum number of users for each pricing plan". Plan names and limits change; check the current page before making a decision that costs money.