New Shopify Store for Employees To Use

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1

Good Morning,

I’m exploring to see if we can run a Shopify store for our company employees, we have sales teams and engineers that request branded items that we right now manually track and distribute to them. Typically these items go to their customers.

Before i continue with a Shopify store i wanted to see if the below requirements can be accomplished.

  • Employee-only store with required username and password login

  • All items checkout at $0 (no payments)

  • Employees must select their district (Cost Center) from a required dropdown list at checkout before placing the order

  • Employees should be able to have individual accounts with saved profiles (name, email, shipping address, and possibly district)

  • Shirt and hoodie orders must have a minimum of 24 per graphic, and checkout should be blocked if the requirement is not met (too many people do not follow this rule)

Thanks for the help.

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2

Yes, all of this is possible, either by using apps or with small theme modifications.

  1. Can be either app, like Locksmith or simple theme mod to redirect visitors to login/sign-up page unless they are logged in. I believe if you search forum you’d find a bunch of suggestions for this;
  2. Yes, can set your products to 0 price.
  3. This can be actually be a Metafield on a customer record if they only linked to one district, or can have it added in the cart drawer/page (checkout is (generally)not modifiable in Shopify);
  4. Yes. Employees as customers, they do not need user accounts at shopify backend (which is limited);
  5. This can be done in multiple ways – either validation code in theme, and/or validation logic after order is placed…
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Hey @Patricksternkopf!

I’m one of the cofounders of Zendra (a membership app on the Shopify App Store). The advice in this thread is solid overall, but I wanted to flag that you can skip the theme.liquid hacks and Locksmith for the access control piece.

Zendra handles this as one of its core solutions: create a free “Employee” membership plan, assign your employees, and use product restriction to gate your entire catalog to members only. Each employee gets their own account with saved info, and non-members see nothing. No code, no workarounds.

For the rest of your setup:

  • $0 checkout: Manual payment method (“Internal Allocation”) like MandasaTech described. That’s the right approach regardless of what you use for access control. You could get complicated and use the concept of credits if you wanted to provide a periodic allocation of perks, though.

  • Cost Center dropdown: Cart attributes with validation is still the way to go here. Zendra doesn’t touch checkout fields.

  • MOQ of 24 per graphic: You’ll still need cart validation logic or an app like MinMaxify for that.

The benefit of using a membership app for the access control layer instead of theme code is that it’s easier to manage. Adding/removing employees is just toggling membership status instead of maintaining password lists or custom redirects. And if you ever want to add permission tiers (e.g., sales team sees different products than engineering, or sales teams for different client lists have different options, etc.), you just create additional membership plans.

Happy to answer any questions about the setup if you decide to check us out!