Every piece of software starts out quietly assuming its own first user is the only kind of user there is. Ours assumed a store owner: one person, one store, one dashboard. It took an actual human showing up with five stores to point out, politely, that the assumption was incomplete.
We started hearing from a different kind of user than the one we’d built for: people who don’t run one store. They run several, often for different clients, sometimes under different brands, all at once. Our first version had nothing useful to offer them beyond “log out, log back in as someone else.”
What “one account, one store” actually meant underneath
In the original design, an account and a store were basically the same thing. You signed up, you connected your store, and everything downstream of that assumed there was exactly one of it. That’s a completely reasonable assumption for a solo store owner. It falls apart the moment someone needs to look after five stores that aren’t all personally theirs — an agency managing client accounts, or a seller who’s grown into more than one shop.
For those users, our early setup forced a genuinely bad choice: either share one login across a whole team (which is its own mess — you lose any real sense of who did what, and you can’t cleanly cut someone off when they leave), or open a completely separate account for every single store, with no way to see them side by side.
Why we didn’t just bolt on a quick fix
The tempting shortcut was a thin workaround — a dropdown to switch between stores, sitting on top of the same one-account-one-store assumption underneath. We didn’t do that, because it would have papered over the real gap instead of closing it: reporting across stores still wouldn’t have worked cleanly, and access still would have been all-or-nothing.
So instead we built real multi-store support: one account that can genuinely hold more than one connected store, with real separation between them, so an agency or a multi-shop merchant can see what they’re managing without duct tape holding it together.
Why this matters to you
Whether or not you personally run more than one store, this is a genuinely useful question to ask any analytics or marketing tool before you commit to it — because “multi-store support” gets used loosely, and the honest version and the marketing version aren’t always the same thing:
- Ask what “multi-store” actually means for that specific tool. Does it mean one login where you can see and manage everything in one place — or does it just mean you’re welcome to buy a second subscription and log in twice? Those are very different products wearing the same phrase.
- If you manage stores for clients, ask about access specifically. Can you give someone access to one store without handing them all of them? If the honest answer is “not really,” that’s worth knowing before you’re relying on it under pressure.
- If you’re a solo store owner today but might grow into more than one, it’s worth asking the question now anyway. It’s a quick, reliable way to tell whether a tool was actually built with room to grow — or just built for the one customer standing directly in front of it, the way ours originally was.
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