Becoming an agency

The shape of an agency engagement

1. You build the store inside your own org as a property you own. You can iterate as much as you want; there's no merchant on the other side yet.
2. When you're ready to hand off, you open the property's settings and start a handoff invite. You provide the merchant's email and (optionally) the name their new org should take.
3. The merchant gets a link. Clicking it walks them through setting a password. On submit, the property transfers from your org to a fresh org we create for them, and they sign in.
4. At handoff time, depending on the option you picked, you can either keep operational access (as a Collaborator) and earn rev share, or hand off cleanly with no further involvement.

The two handoff modes

Partner handoff. Your org retains Collaborator access on the new merchant org, and an Attribution is created, so you earn lifetime rev share on whatever they pay us. The merchant can revoke your Collaborator access at any time from their team panel; that doesn't affect the rev share.

Clean handoff. Pure ownership transfer. Your org loses access to the property the moment the merchant accepts. No rev share, no Collaboration. Use this when the engagement is a fixed-scope build with no ongoing involvement.

The choice is yours, made at invite-creation time. The merchant doesn't see or consent to it. Attribution is VeryQuery's internal accounting, not a contract with them. Collaborator access (if you keep it) is independently revocable.

Prerequisites for the partner mode

To use the partner-handoff mode, your org must have accepted the partner terms. If you haven't, the property settings page will surface the accept-terms CTA before the handoff invite form appears.

Multiple clients

Build each client's store as its own property inside your agency org. Properties are independently configured (their own search settings, merchandising, integrations). When you hand them off, each one moves to its own merchant org, so your agency org doesn't accumulate empty stubs.

Until handoff, your agency org owns the property and pays its bill. Once handed off, the merchant's org owns the bill. There's no shared-billing or back-charging mechanism. Billing transfers cleanly with ownership.

Team management on a partner-handed-off store

If you kept Collaborator access via the partner handoff, every member of your agency org gets operational access to the new merchant's store automatically. You can restrict to specific team members per-Collaboration (the field exists in the data model; the UI ships when an agency asks for it).

API keys your team creates on a partner store are tagged with your agency's org id. If the merchant revokes your Collaboration, those keys auto-revoke too. Keys the merchant's own team creates aren't touched.

Getting paid

Same as the referral flow: complete Stripe Connect onboarding once, then rev share entries become eligible 30 days after each charge. The Refer a store page covers the payout mechanics, which are identical for agency-handoff attributions.

What's NOT in this flow

Installing on a client's existing Shopify store from inside our dashboard ("install for a new client") isn't part of the handoff path. Today's flow is: agency installs via the client's Shopify admin (or via VeryQuery's existing connect-with-merchant-admin path) inside the agency's org, configures, then issues a handoff invite. The agency-driven OAuth surface is a future addition.

The full commercial details (rate snapshot semantics, anti-fraud language, what happens when an agency fires another agency for the same store) are in the Partner Program Terms.