Live Nation
Live Nation enables a 44,000-strong workforce to make purchases through their Shopify Plus stores with ease
First Glance
Live Nation is huge, we all know that. They provide marketing and merchandise support for some of the biggest bands and venues across the country. It takes a big staff to manage all that and Live Nation needed a solid API integration with their HR system and Shopify to handle their team. Through workflow automation and app integration, Live Nation wanted to remove the cumbersome and tedious processes associated with internal and external access to their Shopify sites. Live Nation reached out to local Los Angeles agency Sunrise Integration for Shopify help. Our Shopify experts helped Live Nation utilize Shopify’s SSO capabilities to create an easy-to-use system.
The Challenge
Live Nation has a significant footprint in ecommerce, operating hundreds of Shopify Plus stores to sell event related merchandise. As a business that constantly innovates and improves, Live Nation had a few goals in mind. One was to make it easy for their team members to access and get merchandise directly from their Shopify Plus stores. In addition, with so many large artist Shopify sites, Live Nation needed a way to easily manage and update the Shopify themes to display marketing information about merchandise and shows.
In order to achieve their goals, Live Nation needed a custom integration with their SSO platform, Okta, and Shopify Plus to provide access and discounts for event merchandise. Their Okta SSO service allows employees to access all their cloud applications with one sign in to avoid having to sign in on each platform separately.
Live Nation makes use of several SaaS platforms to manage employee purchases including Shopify Plus, Okta and Workday (HR management system). Our team had to integrate all of these systems while ensuring the proper application of employee access and discounts.
Secondly, with so many different Shopify Plus stores for major recording artists, Live Nation found it cumbersome to send mass updates across all sites. Their team would often need to push notifications about large performance events and merchandise specials.
Sunrise Integration took on the challenge to implement Shopify solutions for each of these issues.
The Solution
Live Nation needed an enterprise solution for their ecommerce challenges. If we were going to help them in any way, we had to think about a scalable solution using the proper technology. Our integration team quickly realized that Live Nation was going to need a powerful custom middleware service to handle the automation and communication. We set out to design and implement a layer that would handle the single-sign-on with Okta and send updates to their Shopify stores using a theme API service.
We began the project with Live Nation with a detailed discovery phase. This step was crucial because it gave us the time and space to fully understand Live Nation’s internal systems, team structure, security protocols, and business goals. A proper discovery helps uncover technical requirements, integration constraints, and user workflows that may not be obvious at first glance. In Live Nation’s case, we worked closely with their IT and HR teams to map out how user data flows from their HR platform into Okta, how roles are assigned, and what level of access different teams need within Shopify. We also identified key compliance requirements and operational goals tied to their retail operations.
For the SSO portion we used Shopify’s SAML integration to connect Live Nation’s Okta platform with their HR system and then send the employee’s info to the Shopify store. This setup allowed us to create a single sign-on (SSO) experience, so Live Nation employees can log in to Shopify using their existing Okta credentials. When an employee joins, leaves, or changes roles within the company, those updates are managed in the HR platform and automatically reflected in Okta. Because Okta is now connected to Shopify through SAML, those changes instantly apply to Shopify access as well. This eliminates the need to manually create, update, or remove accounts in Shopify, reducing the chance of human error and improving security. It also speeds up onboarding and offboarding by ensuring the right people always have the right level of access. With this SSO in place, Live Nation’s teams can focus on their work without dealing with multiple logins, while IT retains centralized control over who can access their Shopify environment.
After this process was complete, Sunrise Integration built a custom middleware tool to automate all the software they had in their technology stack. Furthermore, Live Nation’s Shopify Plus employee stores were modified to work with the different HR access requirements by event and department.
In parallel with the SSO integration, we also developed a custom Shopify App for Live Nation called Site Manager Central. This app was built to efficiently manage and deploy consistent content across the more than 200 Shopify Plus stores operated under the Live Nation brand. Each store represents a different artist and while the storefronts vary in design, there is a need to keep key information uniform across all of them. Live Nation was looking to push support policies, shipping details, terms, and privacy info to each site.
Site Manager Central functions as a centralized content management system (CMS) that allows authorized staff to update and manage shared assets from one interface. Rather than logging in to each individual Shopify store and making changes manually, the team can now deploy content updates to any number of stores with a single click. The system uses Shopify’s API to push updates, allowing for efficient and accurate publishing of static information across the network of stores.
This tool dramatically reduces the time and resources needed to maintain content consistency. For Live Nation, that means faster store launches for new artist campaigns, quicker policy updates when business needs change, and a lower risk of miscommunication or outdated information. It also streamlines workflows for their internal teams, freeing them up to focus on higher-value tasks instead of routine manual updates. Combined with the SSO setup, Site Manager Central gives Live Nation a tightly integrated, scalable system that simplifies how their ecommerce operations are managed across a large and dynamic store portfolio.
Looking to the Future
The success of the Live Nation project was rooted in careful planning, strong collaboration, and the use of custom API integration to meet their operational needs. Our discovery phase helped us understand their workflows, security requirements, and long-term business goals. From there, we delivered a seamless SAML-based SSO integration that connected Okta, their HR system, and Shopify, giving their team secure, centralized access and simplifying user management. Alongside this, we developed Site Manager Central, a custom Shopify app that served as the central hub for managing content across more than 200 Live Nation Shopify Plus stores. This tool empowers their staff to deploy updates to any number of artist stores instantly, saving hours of manual work while maintaining consistency and accuracy across the board. This project included
Looking ahead, Live Nation has invited us to continue supporting their growth on Shopify Plus by advising on future enhancements and additional custom solutions across other areas of their ecommerce business. In addition, Live Nation has engaged Sunrise Integration to help with strategy and development for other great projects like in-store kiosks and event pop-up shops with point-of-sale (POS) requirements. It’s exciting to work on such interesting projects with Live Nation and we look forward to more.
As they continue to scale and launch new artist campaigns, our focus will remain on building systems that improve efficiency, strengthen integration between platforms, and support their expanding digital commerce strategy.
