Enable Two-Factor Authentication

Enabling two-factor authentication is how you require everyone on your team to prove who they are with more than a password. When it is on, each team member must complete a second verification step to log in. A password that is guessed or stolen will not let anyone into your store on its own. This is one of the highest-value security settings you can turn on, because it protects every team account at once. It lives in Settings, on the Security page that sits beneath Users.

Before you begin

• Your role includes Manage security settings, the permission that governs this page. The rule you are about to set binds the whole team, so it is not one every role can make.
• You are ready for every team member to be required to use two-factor authentication, since the setting applies to the whole team.
• You can reach Settings > Users in the admin. The Security page sits beneath it, and the first three steps below walk the way there.

Enable two-factor authentication

Open the Security page

The setting is not on the Users page itself, which is where most people look first. Users has two pages of its own tucked underneath it in the Settings menu, and Security is one of them.

That is worth seeing rather than reading, because it explains why the page is easy to miss. In the Settings menu, Users sits in the main list between Policies and Notifications. Selecting it reveals Roles and Security indented below it, the way a folder reveals what is inside. Whichever of the two you are on is shown in bold, so the menu doubles as a marker of where you are.

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1. Open the Settings menu. If the menu is not showing, the navigation button at the top left of the admin opens it. The menu is what carries every settings page, so nothing below is reachable until it is open.
2. Select Users. It is in the main list, under Policies. This opens the team member list and, at the same time, expands the two pages beneath it.
3. Select Security. It is the second of the two indented entries, under Roles, and boxed in the picture above. This is the page the rest of the article works on, and it is where the rules that apply to the whole team are set. Roles, its neighbour, is the other half of the same subject. Security is where you set how people prove who they are. Roles is where the store's roles are listed, Owner and Admin among them, with the number of people holding each.

The page opens on its heading and a line describing what it covers: security settings that protect your store and your team member accounts. Four sections sit below that, and the second one is where this setting lives.

Read down that list and the page has a shape. It starts with what your team has already done, then moves to how they are let in. The last two cover the ways an outsider might get in instead: with a code you handed out, or from an address you never limited. Two-factor authentication belongs to the middle question, how the people who do belong there prove it.

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Turn the setting on

Scroll to Authentication requirements. It sets the security standards all team members must follow when accessing your store, and holds the two-factor control along with the strong-password and session-timeout rules.

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1. Turn on Enforce two-factor authentication. Switch the Enforce two-factor authentication toggle on. From then on each person completes a second verification step when they log in.
2. Know what off means. Off is the state the toggle arrives in, and it leaves a password as the only thing between an outsider and your store, with Require strong passwords, which is already on, standing behind it. A password can be reused on another site, written down, or handed to the wrong person, and none of that is visible to you.
3. Consider the other authentication rules. Review the other rules in the same section. Require strong passwords enforces minimum password requirements including length, complexity, and regular updates. Automatic session timeout signs out inactive team members after 30 minutes to protect account access. Turning these on adds further protection alongside two-factor authentication.

The toggle says all team members, and it means it. This is not a rule for people who join from now on.

There is one situation where waiting is the better call, and it is not about how much you trust your team. If people are mid-task, or working across time zones where you cannot reach them, the second step lands on someone who has no idea it is coming and no one to ask. Pick a quiet hour, say so beforehand, and the same setting costs nobody a morning. Waiting for that hour is sensible. Leaving the toggle off indefinitely because the conversation is awkward is not, since the risk it covers does not wait with you.

Best practices

• Tell your team first. The setting applies to everyone, so let people know before you turn it on.
• Pair it with strong passwords. Turn on Require strong passwords so the first factor is hard to guess.
• Add a session timeout. Automatic session timeout limits the risk from an unattended device that is still logged in.
• Keep it on. Leave two-factor authentication enforced rather than turning it off for convenience.

If something goes wrong

• A team member cannot log in. The likeliest cause is that their own second step is not set up yet. That is done from their account rather than from this page, so the fix is theirs to carry out, not yours to apply for them.
• You want to protect just one account. The store setting applies to the whole team; there is no per-person exception in this section.
• You cannot change the setting. Your role may not include Manage security settings. An owner, or an admin whose role carries that permission, can make the change instead.

Next steps

• Two-Factor Authentication
• Invite Team Members
• Roles and Permissions

Related articles

• Users for the page where your team is managed.

• Manage Users

• Activity Log

  THE BOLD-MENU CLAIM WAS VERIFIED rather than assumed. On settings/users/roles the Roles entry computes to font-weight 600 and Security to 400; on settings/users/security the reverse. So the menu really does mark the open page, for both entries and not just the one that happened to be captured. FOUR OVERCLAIMS WRITTEN EARLIER TODAY WERE CUT, all of them mine and none of them on screen. "The only place the store-wide authentication rules are set" asserted a sweep of the admin that was never done, and now reads as where these rules are set, with the Roles/Security split stated instead. "Meets the second step the next time they log in" asserted timing that no screen states and that could not be tested without enforcing 2FA on a live store. "The second verification step their account prompts for" asserted a prompt on an enrolment screen this pass never opened. And Automatic session timeout read "thirty minutes" against criterion 2.11, while the screen reads 30 minutes. BEFORE YOU BEGIN no longer instructs the reader to open Settings > Users, since the steps immediately below now do exactly that; it states the access as a condition instead, which is what a prerequisite is for. The badge was kept. -->