Creating a Membership on Shopify

• Creating Tiers
• Creating Terms
• Gated Access/Perks
• Reviewing and Publishing

With memberships, you can set up recurring payments from fans and, in turn, reward them with paid content or items from your shop. We'll show you how to set one up in this tutorial, but before you start, make sure to:

1. Enable customer accounts in Shopify
2. Update your payment gateway

Once that’s taken care of, you can begin! From the Memberships tab in your Single dashboard, click “+ Create Membership.”

Give your membership a name, a start time, and the name of the creator for whom it is for. Add an image and click “Save and Continue” when you’re finished.

Note: Here, we are only setting the title and image that will represent the overarching membership as a whole. We will set the titles and images for each membership tier in the next phase of the process.

Creating Tiers

Tiers offer fans different ways to become paid members. They can be changed at any time and thought of as different “levels” of a membership. Each tier can have its own price, term, and exclusive perks.

Having multiple tiers allows you to offer members things like:

• Access to an ever changing line of exclusive merch
• Exclusive discounts on select (or all) products
• Access to exclusive video content
• Early access to content and merch drops
• And much, much, more

Now, let’s make some tiers! Start by entering a title, a description of what each tier includes, as well as an image to go with it.

Creating Terms

For each tier you create, you'll need to specify how long your membership will last and how much it will cost before it expires or renews. You can add options for terms of 1, 3, 6, and 12 months, but it's not necessary to offer all four of them as seen in the example below.

Click the “Term” drop down menu, select a term length, and enter a price in the “Price” field. You can add more terms by clicking the “+Add Term” button.

Gated Access

Now, let's give your tier some perks! Perks can be thought of as a way to reward fans with members-only content or items in your Shopify storefront. You can add as many perks to a tier as you want, or you can keep it simple by only adding a few that have higher-impact.

To start setting up your perks, click the "+ Select Items" button in the "Gated Access" section of your tier page. This will let you search for products or pages in your Shopify admin to gate access to –or, to put it another way, make exclusive to tier members as perks.

Next, choose your content type from the drop-down menu...

...then search your Shopify storefront for the exact product, page, or video you want to gate. At the time, only the featured product images will display when you gate a product.

Note: Changing the visibility settings (Visible or Hidden) of a gated page within Shopify will disable the gating functionality and it will become public again. In order to fix this, you must go into Single, remove that page from the Gated Access section, save, then re-add it.

Note: You can’t gate a specific product variant. You have to gate the product and all of its variants.

Next, you'll set the Permitted Purchase Quantity field and the Discounts Allowed and Content Preview toggles accordingly.

The Permitted Purchase Quantity fields limit the number of times a member may claim a specific product. If your content type is set to product, you can use it to prevent a few people from buying out the entire stock at once and to ensure that every member has a fair chance to purchase it.

The Discounts Allowed switch determines whether or not a gated product is eligible for a discount. If your content type is set to product, just toggle the switch that says "Discounts Allowed" to the right. If the switch isn't on, the gated product can't be discounted in any way.

The Content Preview toggle lets you control who can see gated products and pages in your store. If you turn this toggle on for a gated product, both members and non-members will be able to see the product in your store – but only members will be able to buy it. Likewise, if you turn this toggle on for a gated page, members and non-members will be able to go to the page, but only members will be able to see the content.

If you want to add additional gated products or pages to this tier, click "+Add Item." Otherwise, you can click the "Save and Create Another" button to move onto your next tier.

🚨SHORTCUT ALERT!🚨

To save you time when setting up more tiers, click the "Duplicate" button. This will copy your gated access settings from a previous tier to the new one.

Clicking this button will let you copy over the gated content from a previous tier to the current one you are creating. Simply select the tier you want to duplicate in the drop down menu to do so.

Note: Once you duplicate the gated content from one tier to another, you will be prompted to save your changes before it will take effect. Once you save, you’ll be taken to the main page of the membership in the Single dashboard. To go back in and add the additional gated items to the tier you were working on, simply click on the tier and you’ll be back to where you left off, but with the other tier’s content copied over!

After you've created all the desired tiers for your membership, click the “Save and Continue” button to move on to the Review page.

Reviewing and Publishing Your Membership

Congrats! You’re ready to look over your membership and make it live. Double check that all membership details are correct and press “+ Publish Membership” when you’re ready. If you haven’t yet, you’ll be prompted to enable customer accounts and update your payment gateway in this step.

❗️IMPORTANT❗️

Be sure to review all aspects of your membership. While you can always edit the perks of your membership, pricing and many other aspects of your membership will no longer be editable after you make it live. Thus, it is extremely important that you double check that all membership details are correct before proceeding. For a full list of everything that can and cannot be edited after publication, please see HERE.

If you archive a membership or one of its individual tiers, all respective members of what was archived will be lost. THIS IS IRREVERSIBLE. If you take this action and wish to regain the lost members, customers will have to repurchase the membership at full price and restart their selected term. See HERE for more info.

Now that we've gone over how to create a membership, make sure to check out the next steps: Adding Your Membership Pages to Your Shop Navigation.