Eshop Guide was one of the first agencies in Germany to do nothing but Shopify. Back when there was no Shopify partner management in Germany, or anywhere in Europe, they were the third entry on the country’s partner list. Today they’re around 50 people working remotely across Germany, part of a larger European agency group since early 2026, and they’ve launched more than 500 Shopify stores.

The work has changed shape over the years. Oliver Schönbett, now Eshop Guide’s solution architect, remembers when a store was a two-day job. “We had a Word template, you filled it out, and two days later your shop was ready,” he says. A store ran around $2,000. Last year, the team did roughly 40 go-lives, and the projects look nothing like the early ones. A recent Swiss build came in closer to $400,000, most of it integration work, custom development, and training rather than Shopify configuration itself.

It started small. In 2016, three friends, Oliver, Patrick on sales, and Dave on development, took freelance gigs on Upwork because the German market for Shopify wasn’t there yet. They ran the whole thing out of a single Gmail account that all three of them shared.

They kept it that way on purpose. “We were refusing to switch to dedicated email addresses for a long time because we wanted to be able to respond all together to the same mails,” Oliver says. The fear was losing sight of each other. “It cannot be that Patrick isn’t there one day, and I don’t know what he sent to somebody else.”

For a while, it held. Oliver triaged most of the inbox, Patrick handled sales, and Dave mostly stayed in the code, so there weren’t many collisions. Then the work got bigger.

When one login stopped working

Two things happened at once. The projects coming in from Germany were full replatforming projects, not one-off Upwork tasks, which meant more people on both sides and more threads in flight. And they were about to hire their fourth person, which meant they finally needed individual accounts, the very thing that would split up the shared view they had protected for two years.

So Oliver went looking for a way to maintain visibility and lose the shared password. He tried Google’s old Inbox app, which worked on the single account but solved nothing once they moved to separate logins. He ran two-week trials of Front and another tool. Front was capable, but it cost about three times as much as Gmail did and bundled in channels they didn’t want. “What they always do is, look, you have email today, but you will need SMS at one point, and then they force you into new plans,” he says.

Missive was newer and narrower, and that was the appeal. It did the one thing they actually needed: let a team share emails without sharing an account. Everyone logged in as themselves, but the inbox remained visible to all of them. The founder personally answered support emails, which felt familiar to a small team supporting other small teams.

What sold them was two features. They could assign a conversation so there was never a question of who owned it, and they could leave internal comments on a thread that the client would never see.

Rules and labels that run a 50-person agency

Eight years on, the same principle runs at a much bigger scale. The feature the team leans on most is team inboxes. Incoming mail doesn’t land in a pile for someone to sort by hand; rules read each message as it arrives and route it to the right team based on the form it came from, the client, or a notification from one of the stores they manage. Eshop Guide runs around 50 of these rules, sending app-support questions one way, Shopify Plus questions to a specific person on sales, and phone-service transcripts to whoever needs them.

The payoff Oliver points to first is coverage. “You don’t really need to take care of emails when you’re on vacation. Somebody will have it in the inbox,” he says. Because routing happens automatically and everyone can see the team inboxes, a person being out for a day stops being a problem.

Labels do the second layer of work. The team keeps around 165 of them, some applied by rule and some by hand. Project labels keep more than 500 jobs sorted, so a project team sees only its own threads. The accounting process runs on labels too: because Eshop Guide is split into separate business units, a single invoice sometimes goes to one unit and sometimes gets split across several, and the labels decide where it lands.

The toolset has stayed deliberately email-first, which is what Oliver wanted in the first place. The team connects what it needs, like turning client threads into Asana tickets, without being pushed into bundles of features they will never touch. He has also started feeding client conversations into the AI tools the team runs and is waiting on a tighter Missive connection to do more of it.

What hasn’t changed is the thing they were afraid of losing when they gave up that shared Gmail. The agency went from three friends on one login to 50 people across the business, and everyone can still see the work. “It blows my mind that anyone still works email by forwarding and responding,” Oliver says. “The internal communication is so much easier when people can share emails, comment on them, and keep attachments the client never sees.”