Adding and importing staff
Last reviewed: 2026-07-14
On this page
Before you can build a schedule, Team Shift needs to know who your staff are. You can bring them in two ways: syncing from Shopify, or adding them by hand.
Syncing staff from Shopify
On the Staff page, click Sync from Shopify. Team Shift pulls your staff list from Shopify and opens a Review staff sync window showing each person's name, email, assigned locations, and status.
- Each row is tagged New (not in Team Shift yet) or Update (already exists, being refreshed).
- Email addresses are editable right in the review list before you save.
- Locations are set through a multi-select — you can add or remove location tags per staff member before confirming.
- Click Save to commit the reviewed list.
A couple of things worth knowing about this flow:
- Staff who haven't finished setting up their Shopify POS profile yet (for example, a pending invite with no name filled in) are skipped during sync. They'll show up once they finish onboarding on Shopify's side.
- Newly synced staff are assigned to all of your active locations by default. Shopify's staff API doesn't tell Team Shift which specific locations a person should work at, so if someone should only work at one location, you'll need to narrow that down yourself afterward — either right in the review window or on their staff detail page.
If sync isn't available
Staff sync depends on a Shopify feature (the staffMembers API) that's only available to stores on Shopify Plus or Advanced, or to stores that have had it specially enabled by Shopify Support. If your store doesn't have access, clicking Sync from Shopify shows a banner reading "Staff sync isn't available for this store" with an Add staff manually action — use that instead.
Adding staff manually
Click Add manually on the Staff page to open the Add staff manually window. Fields:
- First name (required)
- Last name (required)
- Email (optional)
- Locations — a checklist, shown only if you have locations synced
Click Add staff to save. Manually-added staff get an internal ID inside Team Shift rather than being linked to a real Shopify POS staff profile, so keep in mind: if that person also has a Shopify staff account, syncing later won't automatically merge the two — you may end up with two separate records unless you manage it manually.
Email is optional for manually-added staff, and Team Shift doesn't require it to be unique. If you leave it blank, that staff member simply won't receive schedule-published emails (see Publishing schedules and notifying staff), but everything else — scheduling, clocking in on POS, timesheets — works the same either way.
Getting started with no staff yet
If you haven't added anyone yet, the Staff page shows an empty state — "Add your team to get started" — with the same Sync from Shopify and Add manually actions.