Running client shops as an agency: one login, two ways to bill, and a clean hand-back
How a web designer or small agency runs several client shops without shared passwords, the two ways to bill and the maths at 5, 15 and 40 shops, what the contract must say, and how to hand a shop back when a client leaves. Checked 9 November 2026.
This guide is for a web designer, freelancer or small agency that builds online shops for clients and runs them afterwards. It covers getting into every shop without a spreadsheet of passwords, who should pay the platform and the maths at five, fifteen and forty shops, what the contract must settle, and the hand-back. Disclosure: we build Orbit Commerce, and its agency dashboard is the worked example, so weigh those parts accordingly. Every price and rule was checked against its source on 9 November 2026.
In short
- One agency login, not one password per shop: on Orbit, staff open a live client store’s admin with one click and never see the owner’s password.
- Two ways to bill: your agency pays and resells, with Solo included for the stores you pay for, or the client keeps paying Orbit and you invoice your time.
- Agency tiers run from £200 a month for 10 client stores to £1,350 for 150, ex VAT; fifteen shops on one tier cost less than fifteen separate Solo plans, and at five the tier buys one login, cloning and the hand-back.
- Settle who owns the store, the domain and the data in a written engagement letter; Orbit’s Agency Program Agreement requires one.
- “Release from agency” hands a store back to its owner at once, with a 14-day grace trial to choose a plan if your agency was paying.
What goes wrong when one agency runs ten client shops
The first few client shops run on goodwill: the owner emails you their login and the hosting goes on whoever’s card was nearest. Around the fifth shop, five problems start to cost money. Passwords live in a spreadsheet, two-factor codes go to one phone, and a leaver still knows six clients’ logins. Self-hosted shops each need their own PHP, WordPress, theme and plugin updates, and an urgent fix lands on the attacker’s day, not yours (see our PHP2Shell note). Nobody has decided who pays the platform, so a failed card becomes your problem. The client who leaves asks who owns the shop and the domain; the client who stops paying leaves you paying for their plan while the invoices age. Orbit’s agency terms answer the first problem: never share or store a client’s credentials in clear text; sign in under your own identity with multi-factor authentication on.
Should your agency pay for the platform, or should the client?
Most agencies run both models, one per client. If your agency pays and resells, you invoice one figure for platform, hosting and care, keep the margin and control the plan, and carry the risk of a client who stops paying. If the client keeps paying, you charge for your time: no margin, but no platform debt and no doubt about what they own. On Orbit you choose per store when you invite it in or approve its request to join; a store you create always runs on your plan, and either way it takes one of your tier’s store slots.
| Question | Your agency pays | The client keeps paying |
|---|---|---|
| Who pays Orbit | You; Solo included, other plans at the standard price | The client; nothing to your agency |
| What the client’s billing page says | Managed by your agency; no checkout to face | Their plan as before, with a note that you manage the store |
| Who controls plan changes | You, with an agency-wide switch and a per-store override | The client, always |
The margin and cash-flow maths at 5, 15 and 40 client shops
Orbit’s seven agency tiers are priced by the client stores they hold, from Starter (10 stores, £200 a month) to Enterprise (150 stores, £1,350), ex VAT, yearly at ten months’ price, with the Solo plan (£25 a month on its own) included on every store your agency pays for.
| Client shops | Smallest tier that holds them | A month, ex VAT | The same shops on separate Solo plans |
|---|---|---|---|
| 5 | Starter, 10 stores, 3 agency seats | £200 (£40 a shop) | £125 |
| 15 | Growth, 20 stores, 5 agency seats | £350 (£23 a shop) | £375 |
| 40 | Professional, 40 stores, 10 agency seats, Team included | £560 (£14 a shop) | £1,000 |
At five shops the tier buys one login, cloning, three seats and a clean hand-back for £200, against the £125 five clients would pay for Solo themselves. Starter pays for itself at eight shops (8 × £25 = £200), and at fifteen and at forty the tier costs less than the plans it replaces. At forty, Professional includes the Team plan (£85 on its own) on stores created or brought in on it; a move up on a store you already run, or a store on the Enterprise plan (£999 a month), goes on your agency card at the standard price.
Now the margin. Suppose you charge each client £75 a month for platform, hosting, updates and an hour of changes (your number will differ). Five shops: £375 in, £200 out, £175 left before your time. Fifteen: £1,125 in, £350 out, £775. Forty: £3,000 in, £560 out, £2,440. The platform cost per shop falls from £40 to £14 as you grow, which widens your margin on every shop, all ex VAT. Yearly billing costs ten months but is paid up front while clients pay you monthly, so stay monthly until the list is steady. Under the client-pays model your tier is a fixed cost, clients pay Orbit £25, £85, £249 or £999 a month for their own plans, and you invoice for time. The card fees a client pays on each platform are in the best ecommerce platform for a UK small business, by true cost.
Setting up a client shop: cloning, domains, mailboxes and staff access
Create it, clone it, or bring it in
A new client store is a form: name it, the subdomain writes itself, Solo is included, and a tick box, “Invite the client now”, sends the client a sign-in link as store admin. Clone Site copies a finished build in four steps. It copies pages, products with or without stock levels, categories, brands, theme, settings, shipping and tax, and discounts, plus the plugins you choose; orders, customers and payment details are never cloned. A client already on Orbit joins by the store code they read off Settings, then Transfer store: you choose who pays, nothing changes until the owner accepts, invites expire after 7 days, and each approved store uses one slot.
Domains, DNS and mailboxes
Register a domain for a client or connect one they own, edit its DNS records in the agency dashboard, and switch on auto-renew. Email hosting adds 5, 25 or 100 mailboxes per domain with 5, 10 or 25GB each, and on an agency-managed domain the MX records are set for you; domain and mailbox prices are set in US dollars and converted to your billing currency at checkout. Every client store runs on AWS in London with its certificate handled, and platform updates reach every store as they ship, with no plugin stack of your own to regression-test (hosting and domains).
Staff access without using the client’s seats
Agency seats come with the tier, from 3 on Starter to unlimited on Enterprise, in two roles. Admins add stores, invite people and look after domains and email. Staff open any live client store from the Sites grid with one-click login, which signs them in, and work inside it as a store admin (team and roles). Nobody shares a password, your staff never see the owner’s, and none of it uses the client store’s own seats; an agency-created Solo store has 3 staff seats instead of the usual one, for the client’s people.
What should the contract with the client say?
Orbit’s Agency Program Agreement, published on our site, requires a written engagement letter with each client, and its minimum list works anywhere. It covers five things: the parties, scope and term; who bills the platform fees, and whether the client pays the platform directly or you pass the fees through; handover of credentials, ownership and intellectual property, and data return at the end; data protection terms that mirror our data processing addendum where you handle the client’s customer data; and that the client answers for what is sold on the shop. When a client ends the engagement you must transfer back any account ownership, credentials, configurations, deliverables and data that belong to them, and may not hold them hostage over a billing dispute.
The data point is not optional: the ICO says “every time a controller uses a processor to process personal data, there must be a written contract” (ICO, When is a contract needed, checked 9 November 2026), and running a client’s shop means handling their customers’ data for them. Four points to settle before you build:
- Who owns the store. On Orbit a store that joins by transfer stays its owner’s; a store your agency creates is owned by the teammate who created it, with the client as admin, so say how ownership passes on hand-back.
- Who is the registrant of the domain. A domain bought through Orbit is registered to the registrant contact given at purchase, not to Orbit.
- What happens to the plan if you were paying. On Orbit the client gets a 14-day grace trial to choose a plan when you release a store you paid for; say so, with a notice period on both sides.
- What “data return” means. Products, orders, customers and pages live inside the store and go with its owner; you delete any copies you hold, and our terms of service stay the client’s own contract with Orbit.
How do you hand a shop back when a client leaves?
On Orbit it is one action, “Release from agency”, with a confirmation, and your slot is freed at once. A store that joined by transfer goes straight back to its owner: a 14-day grace trial to choose a plan if your agency was paying, or their own plan carrying on if they were. A store your agency created is owned by the teammate who created it, so after the release that teammate passes it to the client from Settings, then Transfer store. Everything in the store stays in it, the domain follows its registrant, and once the store has left your Sites grid it is no longer yours to open with one-click login.
The client who stops paying you gets the same process after the notice your letter gives: your slot is freed, they have 14 days to pick a plan with Orbit directly, and their shop keeps running on the grace trial while they choose. Keeping the platform contract apart from your service contract lets you stop working without switching anyone’s shop off. If the client leaves Orbit altogether, products, orders and customers export as CSV, and changing ecommerce platform without losing your search rankings covers the redirects.
How does this compare with Shopify Partners or WordPress hosting?
On Shopify a partner builds a client transfer store in the Dev Dashboard and transfers it: afterwards “the merchant owns the store and it leaves your organization”, and it is not eligible for promotions or free trials (Shopify Help Center, checked 9 November 2026). For a store the merchant already owns, they issue a request code and approve a collaborator account: “Collaborators don’t count towards your store’s user limit”, the merchant controls which areas you reach, and partners must use two-step authentication (Shopify collaborator accounts, checked 9 November 2026).
On a transferred store the partner earns 20% of the merchant’s monthly base platform fee plus 0.1% of eligible sales for four years, in US dollars and at Shopify’s discretion (Shopify, How to earn, checked 9 November 2026). On WordPress.com the Commerce plan built for WooCommerce is US$70 a month, or US$45 a month billed yearly, and Automattic for Agencies advertises “up to 50% revenue share” for agencies that migrate and promote client sites (WordPress.com pricing, checked 9 November 2026). On self-hosted WordPress the updates are the agency’s job or the owner’s. On Orbit a store the client owns can sit in your dashboard under either billing model and leave again with a release, without changing hands.
Where Orbit fits
The agency dashboard is one login for every client store: create, one-click login, clone, bring in by store code, release. Tiers run from £200 a month for 10 client stores to £1,350 for 150, ex VAT; Solo is included on every tier for the stores you pay for, Team from Professional and Pro from Agency Pro, on the stores you create or bring in on that plan. The trial is 14 days on Growth, 20 client stores, no card, at agency.myorbitcommerce.net; above 150 stores, book a call. Your clients’ plans are on the pricing page, our post on when a shop needs custom development explains fixed quotes, and a partner account for building plugins or themes is free.
If you hand shops over and walk away, the affiliate programme may fit better. At the time of checking it pays 25% of every plan invoice a referred shop pays, renewals included and with no end date while the programme stays on its recurring model. Commission is held 30 days and paid on the 1st of the month once your balance reaches £50. You build the client’s store free as a dev store with live payments off and hand it over by email; the client picks a plan and pays with no trial, and the handover credits the shop to you.
Read next: recurring affiliate income from an ecommerce platform, choosing a theme for your shop type and two-factor sign-in and passkeys.
Questions people ask about running client shops as an agency
Can an agency manage several Orbit shops from one login?
Yes. The agency dashboard holds 10 to 150 client stores by tier, and agency staff open any live client store’s admin with one-click login without anyone sharing a password. None of your team uses a client store’s own staff seats.
Who pays for the platform when an agency builds a client’s shop?
Either. A store the agency creates on Orbit runs on the agency’s plan, with Solo included and other plans at the standard price, and the agency invoices the client. A store brought in from an existing Orbit account can instead stay on the client’s own subscription at no cost to the agency.
Does the client own the shop if the agency pays for it?
A store that joins the agency by transfer stays its owner’s whoever pays. A store the agency creates is owned by the teammate who created it, with the client as its admin, so after a release that teammate passes ownership to the client from Settings, then Transfer store.
What happens if a client stops paying their agency?
Give the notice your engagement letter sets, then release the store and your slot is freed that day. If your agency was paying, the client gets a 14-day grace trial to choose a plan with Orbit directly and the shop keeps running while they choose. You may not hold their data or credentials back over the dispute.
How do I hand an online shop back to a client?
Choose “Release from agency” on the store and confirm. A store that joined by transfer returns to its owner at once, with a 14-day grace trial if you were paying. For a store your agency created, the teammate who owns it then transfers ownership to the client from Settings, then Transfer store. Everything in the store stays in it, and the domain stays with its registrant.
Build a first client store in the 14-day free trial, no card required, or start the agency trial on Growth and clone your first build into a second shop.