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Connecting more than one store

If you run more than one Shopify store, you can connect them and manage all of their affiliate programs while signed into any one of them. You approve applicants, pay commissions, edit programs, and change settings for every store without signing out.

Connecting stores does not merge them. Each store keeps its own affiliates, its own programs, its own discount codes, its own payouts, and its own books. Nothing is shared between them except your ability to reach them.

What connecting does

A group is a permission record between stores you own. It says that an admin of one may act on the other. It is not a data merge: an affiliate on one store does not appear on the other, and a commission earned on one is never payable from the other.

What it costs

One store pays the monthly plan fee. Every store pays its own percentage on its own referral sales.

So if one store is on Professional at $49.99 a month with a 1.5% fee, a second store you connect pays $0 a month and 1.5% of the referral sales it makes itself. You are not charged a second monthly fee for the same plan.

The second store still gets its own Shopify subscription, at $0 a month, and you approve it on Shopify's own screen like any other plan. That is not a formality. A percentage can only be charged against a store's own subscription, so the $0 plan is what makes the second store's fee chargeable at all. Until you approve it, that store is on the free plan.

You can see what every connected store is billed on the Stores page, one line per store.

Connecting a store

You need Sprout Affiliate installed on both stores, and you need to be an admin of both.

1. In the store that will own the group, open Sprout Affiliate, then Stores in the left menu.
2. Click Create a code, and copy the code it gives you.
3. Open Sprout Affiliate in the other store and go to Stores there.
4. Under Join a store you already set up, paste the code and click Join.
5. Go back to the first store's Stores page, where the request is now waiting, and approve it.

Three stores' worth of clicking for one connection, on purpose. Joining a group lets another store act on this one, so it takes an admin of each store to agree, and the code expires after fifteen minutes.

Switching between stores

Once two stores are connected, a store name appears at the top of every page in Sprout Affiliate. Click it and pick another store.

You stay on the page you were on. Switching from one store's Affiliates page lands on the other store's Affiliates page, not back at the dashboard, so you can compare the same screen across stores.

What you can do on another store

Nearly everything. While you are working on another store you can:

• Approve and reject applicants, and edit an affiliate.
• Create and edit programs, and pause one.
• Approve, reject, and unapprove referral orders.
• Pay affiliates, by hand or through PayPal, and undo a recorded payout.
• Read analytics and tracked clicks.
• Reply to affiliate messages and send bulk email, which goes out under that store's name and from that store's reply-to address.
• Change that store's settings: approvals, notifications, links, fraud protection, tax, and the PayPal account that pays its affiliates.
• Edit its registration page, its login page, its portal, and its storefront message bar.
• Import affiliates, programs, or past earnings into it.
• Add marketing assets and edit its marketplace listing.

Everything you do happens as that store. An email sent from another store's page carries that store's brand and reply-to address, because that is the only honest signature on it.

What stays with its own store

Four things can only be done from inside the store they belong to. Each is refused with a message rather than quietly doing the wrong thing.

• Buying or changing a plan. A subscription is approved by that store's own admin on Shopify's screen. There is no way around that, and there should not be.
• The billing page. It describes one store's own subscription.
• Pairing a phone. Pairing creates a lasting credential for a device, and a device outlives the group, so a phone paired from a store beside it would keep access after the two were disconnected.
• Signing into an affiliate's portal as them. That belongs to the store whose affiliate it is.

The record of what was done

Every action one store takes on another is recorded before it runs: which store acted, which store it happened to, what was done, whether money was involved, and how it ended. Actions that move money are flagged as such.

The record is written first, not afterwards. If it cannot be written, the action does not happen. A group is an arrangement between two businesses, and an action neither of them can trace is not one either of them agreed to.

Removing a store

The store that owns the group can remove any member from the Stores page, and any member can leave on its own. Either way the connection ends immediately. The removed store keeps every affiliate, program, referral, and payout record it had, and simply stops being reachable from the others.

If a store is removed while someone is working on it from another store, the action is refused rather than half completed. Removal takes effect at once, not after a delay.