Dear Shopify Team,
I’m writing to raise a serious concern regarding the operational limitations of the Shopify Balance system — specifically, the fact that certain financial functions remain restricted to a single user, even when full administrative permissions have been granted to other trusted users.
In our case, we were assisting with a routine account transition and discovered that the APY earnings deposited into the Shopify Balance account could not be transferred out unless the original store owner was the one logged in. Despite having all permissions that Shopify allows for staff users, access to critical financial controls remains locked to the original account holder.
This is not just a technical inconvenience — it’s a fundamental flaw in the design of your system. In any legitimate business, particularly those that are growing or already operating with a division of responsibilities, it is simply unacceptable to have core financial functionality tied to one individual’s login. This creates a single point of failure for essential business operations. Consider the real-world consequences:
What happens if the owner becomes unavailable or incapacitated?
What if there is an urgent need to access or transfer funds for payroll, refunds, or expenses?
What if ownership changes but certain funds remain stranded under an inaccessible account?
These scenarios are not theoretical. They are inevitable in the life cycle of any business. Limiting financial controls in this way is not a security feature — it’s a business risk.
Modern financial systems, including corporate bank accounts and even competing e-commerce platforms, allow for multiple authorized signers, role-based access, and tiered permissions to avoid exactly this kind of bottleneck. The inability to delegate critical financial tasks is not just inefficient — it's operationally dangerous.
This issue is made more pressing by the nature of Shopify Balance. By encouraging users to treat Shopify as a financial hub and to accrue APY earnings, you have implicitly taken on a responsibility to offer professional-grade financial controls. Tying that access to a single individual contradicts that premise.
We need to see this change not at some point in the future, but urgently. Businesses depend on reliability, redundancy, and administrative flexibility. This system fails that standard today.
I urge your product and development teams to prioritize a solution that allows authorized admin users to fully manage the Balance account — not just view it, but transfer and control funds as necessary. Anything less compromises the trust businesses place in Shopify as a platform built to support serious operations.
