Agency handoff checklist: catalogue integrity before the peak weekend
A handoff before the peak weekend is finished when the merchant can answer three questions without calling you: what can still be restored, who is allowed to change what, and which store owns the truth. The nine items below are written as testable conditions rather than promises, each with the Shopify documentation it rests on. StoreTwin is a multi-store sync and audit app and appears in exactly one of them - the last, where more than one store makes ownership of the catalogue a question somebody has to answer in writing.
Access
1. Collaborator access is scoped to the work, and removed when the work ends
A collaborator account that outlives the project is a live key to the store during the weeks the store earns the most. Scope it to what the project needs, then take it back on the last day.
"Grant only the permissions that the project needs." - Shopify Help Center, checked 29 August 2026.
"Remove the collaborator account from your store when the work is done." - Shopify Help Center, checked 29 August 2026.
Done when - The merchant has opened Settings and read the list of users and collaborators out loud with you, and every name on it has a reason to be there today.
2. Nobody is using the merchant's own login, and the 90-day expiry is not doing the work for you
Shared credentials make every later question - who changed the price, who installed the app - unanswerable. Automatic expiry exists, but it is a timeout, not a review: it fires long after peak, and only if the account sits unused.
"using a merchant's credentials to access their store, is prohibited" - Shopify.dev, theme best practices, checked 29 August 2026.
"If a collaborator user hasn't logged into your store within 90 days, then their access will automatically expire." - Shopify Help Center, checked 29 August 2026.
Done when - Every person who worked on the store has their own account or collaborator access, and the merchant has changed their own password after the last shared session, if there ever was one.
3. The theme repository has a named owner
Whoever holds the repository holds the ability to ship to the storefront. Decide explicitly whether it stays with you or moves to the merchant, and write down which it is.
"transfer the repository as a part of the final package" - Shopify.dev, theme best practices, checked 29 August 2026.
Done when - The handoff document names the repository, its owner, and who has write access - and the merchant has confirmed they can reach it.
What can be restored, said honestly
4. A product export exists, and everyone knows it is not a full-store restore
An export is the cheapest insurance there is, and Shopify lists it as a backup method. What it is not is a rollback button: orders cannot be brought back through the admin, and a duplicated store arrives without its apps and settings.
"Creating a backup of your products." - Shopify Help Center, checked 29 August 2026.
"Orders can't be imported into a store through the Shopify admin" - Shopify Help Center, checked 29 August 2026.
"Reinstall your apps. Manually reconfigure your store settings, for example taxes, shipping, checkout, and payments." - Shopify Help Center, checked 29 August 2026.
Done when - A dated product CSV export is stored somewhere that is not the store, and the handoff document says in one sentence what it does and does not cover.
5. Nobody believes the theme download is a backup of the store
This one costs an evening every year. A downloaded theme is code and settings; the catalogue, the content and the files are not in it.
"Theme downloads don't include your store's products, collections, menus, pages, blog posts, images, or other files in Content > Files." - Shopify Help Center, checked 29 August 2026.
Done when - The merchant can say what each artefact you are handing over contains - theme, product export, inventory export - without opening any of them.
6. The inventory CSV you leave behind is the "All states" format
Two formats exist and they behave differently under a bad import. The complete one validates before it writes; the simple one does not, and that difference is invisible until the day it matters.
"This CSV format provides a complete inventory view and protection against accidental overwrites." - Shopify Help Center, All states format, checked 29 August 2026.
"This CSV format doesn't provide protection against accidental overwrites." - Shopify Help Center, Available format, checked 29 August 2026.
Done when - The exported inventory file has separate rows per location and the on-hand columns, and whoever will edit it next has been told which format to keep.
What must not move by accident
7. Identity columns are frozen: variant IDs and the option columns
Variant identity is what every downstream system - feeds, apps, your own mappings - holds on to. A CSV that reshapes options does not warn you that it is rewriting identity, and an import missing the option columns replaces the variants outright.
"Any change to variant ID values can break third-party dependencies on variant IDs." - Shopify Help Center, checked 29 August 2026.
"If you don't include the Option1 name and Option1 value columns, then a new default variant is created and existing variants are deleted." - Shopify Help Center, checked 29 August 2026.
Done when - The handoff document names which field is the stable key for this store - SKU, barcode or variant ID - and lists every system that depends on it.
8. The sign-off is four numbers, not a walkthrough
A demo proves the screens load. Shopify's own migration guidance signs off on counts and reconciliations, which is the kind of check that catches a quietly missing tenth of the catalogue.
"Row counts" - Shopify Enterprise, data migration, checked 29 August 2026.
"Revenue reconciliation" - Shopify Enterprise, data migration, checked 29 August 2026.
"Inventory integrity" - Shopify Enterprise, data migration, checked 29 August 2026.
Done when - Product, variant and collection counts agree with the source of truth; stock totals agree per location, not only in aggregate; and a handful of high-value products has been opened and read on the live storefront.
9. If there is more than one store, the handoff names which one owns the catalogue
This is the item nobody writes down, and the one that turns into an argument during the sale: two people edit two stores, both believe theirs is authoritative, and the difference between them is discovered by a customer. Ownership is a decision, not a setting - and it belongs in the document, whatever tooling comes later.
"Ensure that your Shopify store is up-to-date, your store's inventory is accurate, and all store functions and operations are working as intended." - Shopify Help Center, transferring ownership, checked 29 August 2026.
Done when - One store is written down as the source, the other stores are written down as receiving, and the document says what happens to an edit made in a receiving store - kept, or overwritten at the next check.
If ownership is not obvious, settle it before you tool it
A one-way setup only makes sense when one store is edited and the others receive. If both stores are genuinely edited by different teams, no sync app makes that safe - it makes it fast. Six yes-or-no questions that decide it, with an honest "we are the wrong tool" behind every no: the fit check.
Once ownership is settled, the useful thing to hand over is not a promise that the stores match but a way to see it: StoreTwin compares both catalogues hourly and fully once a day and names every difference by product and field. The audit runs on the free plan over a catalogue of any size, including one another app is syncing, so it can be left running as a read-only second opinion through the weekend - what the audit does.
Weighing the multi-store apps themselves: the category compared by the work each does. And if you are estimating what a bad edit would cost during the weekend itself, the exposure worksheet does that arithmetic.
Quotes checked 29 August 2026 against Shopify-owned documentation. Platform behaviour changes: re-read the linked pages before relying on any of this in a contract. Agency questions, including several stores at once: support@storetwin.app.
The free plan audits a catalogue of any size and syncs 25 products you pick - enough to leave a client's two stores watched through the peak weekend.