Currently, my company is working for a client who has refused to pay up for the web design services for his site. We’d allowed him access to the Shopify store to train up on how to use the system behind the scenes, but he hadn’t paid his invoice as yet for the work completed.
He has subsequently changed the store admin user details and locked us out of the store, complained about the build, and opted not to pay.
This is obviously a huge issue for us considering the amount of time put into the build and the promised sum. I wanted to ask what recourse we have through Shopify to either re-gain access to the website or to somehow have the Shopify store in questions suspended until the final invoice is paid.
I can provide proof that I worked on the site, and I have evidence of the communications between myself and this client, if that helps.
Sorry to hear you’re facing such a difficult situation with the store in question here.
Thanks for outlining the situation as you did here, and for sharing all that information.
In order to investigate this kind of dispute, we would need to have you reach out via our Help Centre here, so we can securely check this out with you.
Could you confirm if this is a development store you had created under your Partner account and if that store had been handed off to the client in question here?
Let me know if the store is now under a regular, paid Shopify account or if it had not been handed off from your Partner account so we can determine how to proceed.
I have also checked in with our Partners team internally, so we can confirm how best we can proceed with this and will update this post with any info we can get from them.
We were at the stage of handover, so this was not a dev site. The client was pushing to get his stock up online as soon as possible due to stock perishables, so it was indeed a paid Shopify site on a plan.
We provided him with access to the admin account because he had to handle/organise payment processor information (privacy being sensitive in these matters) and to learn the backend of the site. We’d finished the obligations of the contract, so as far as we were aware handover would be occurring soon. This stretched out to two weeks, and then the abrupt changing of the admin account (after communication about how much they appreciated the fast turnaround time and after my boss personally running him through the backend of the site, which is not in our purview). The client has since pointed out issues they have with the site, some of which would be quick fixes but can’t be addressed due to the sudden restriction in access.
The client is a friend of a friend of my boss, or as far as I was told, so we had no reason to suspect this would happen. The outstanding sum is of a substantial dollar value though, so it’s not a project we can take the hit for and move on easily, due to the amount of changes request, redesigns, etc etc.
Additionally, we have a written contract outlining that transfer of the site’s ownership would only be given after payment. So from a legal standpoint, the client is also in the wrong.
Thanks for any further assistance you can render in this matter.