How to set up a private employee swag store?

[MicaelaFouhy]

Hello, I am interested in creating an employee swag store where our employees can go in to the store and buy branded swag. I am unsure how to begin setting up the private store and would like suggestions on how to do so. Thank you!

[JakeDoran]

Hi @MicaelaFouhy 

Exciting news about creating a new store with Shopify!

I would look into what theme you would like to use and building up a wireframe or UI to how you would want this. 

From their you can utilise customer tags for employee of the store to login but be shown a different look based on the customer.tags.

Example would be

(% if customer.tags == 'staff' %}

<!-- Show your staff this -->

{% else %}

{% endif %}

Hope this helps but if you need more help please reach out and let me know. 

Kind regards, 

Jake  

[Greta]

Hi, @MicaelaFouhy!

Thank you for your post, I think an employee swag store is a great idea. I'm happy to provide you with some suggestions. 

For the products themselves, I recommend using a print on demand service. You can upload your own designs (like your company's logo) and choose which products you'd like to offer. You can check out all our print on demand apps here, but here are some popular options: 

• Printful: Print on Demand - Top-rated print on demand dropshipping & warehousing service
• Printify: Print on Demand - Create and Sell Custom Products, We Handle the Rest.
• Apliiq ‑ Print On Demand - The Only App To Properly Brand Apparel Products (Woven Labels)
• Gooten: Print on Demand - Print on Demand Solutions for Visionary Brands

As for making the store private and only accessible for your employees, you have a few options. The simplest way would be to password protect the store, and only provide the password to employees. You could also require customer accounts, that way no one without an account would be able to complete a checkout. Lastly, there are various apps in our app store that allow you to lock/restrict your store (or just certain parts of it) only to those with access. Some options are B2B Login/Lock & Hide Price and Wholesale Lock Manager. These are typically used for wholesale/B2B stores, but I believe it would also work for your situation. 

I hope this helps, and please let me know if you have any further questions!

[gvenigsc]

I don't think it would be easy to set up an employee swag store with Shopify. Employee swag stores require private portals with secure logins. The closest workaround is creating password-protected collections pages.

If you are swag provider supplying products to multiple organisations you might need a unified administrative portal to streamline operations and shopify can't handle that. You need to look for B2B eCommerce platforms with multi-store capabilities like BigCommerce and SellersCommerce for Promotional Products

[Victor]

Hi @MicaelaFouhy,

As @gvenigsc has said, setting up a private store is difficult to do by default but can be achieved with apps. You can enable the password page on the storefront and allow users with the password to view the storefront, however having this page enabled does mean that the checkout is disabled. You could look into using an app such as Locksmith to prevent non-employees from accessing the store while allowing users with access to checkout successfully.