How to setup members only discounts or wholesale subscriptions on Shopify

When a customer signs up for a subscription, you may want to give them discounts on other products in your store.

Chris Rak avatar
Written by Chris Rak
Updated over a week ago

When a customer signs up for a subscription, you may want to give them discounts on other products in your store.

This could be a stand-alone membership, where the customer is paying monthly or yearly for access to lower rates. Think of a Costco membership where you pay yearly and get access to their wholesale pricing. Another option is to offer it as a perk to customers who subscribe to a product(s) in your store. For example, say you are selling a coffee of the month subscription. You could also give subscribers a discount on other items in your Shopify store (say coffee filters or other merchandise), just for being a subscriber. 

This process works through tags. When a customers signs up for a subscription we can tag their account in Shopify. Many Shopify apps can read these tags to enable custom pricing. For example, Wholesale Pricing by Supple Apps can read these tags to offer discounts to collections and individual products, without duplicating variants.

Note: Customers will need to be logged into their Shopify accounts to see the discounted pricing.

The process to set this up in PayWhirl begins with the membership plans:

  • Go To Dashboard > Plans and Click "Create a Plan"

  • Fill out the plan form and customize your membership rates.

  • Note the plan SKU, this will be the tag that is applied in Shopify. Make sure orders are set for Each Installment.

  • Now lets create your widget. Navigate to Dashboard > Widgets & Forms and click create widget. 

  • Click on New Widget button at top right corner 

  • Typically you would use a Pricing Table Widget or a Payment Form for the membership.

  • Now fill out required fields of form as per your requirements, you can choose multiple columns if you will have a few different membership plans.

  • Select the membership plan you created above from the drop down, and you can customize the text. If you have multiple membership plans you can add additional sections to display all the membership levels.

  • Copy your Embed Codes for the Widget or Buy Button, found right under the widget preview.

  • Navigate to the admin part of Shopify and click Online Store>Pages click on add a page. This is going to be the page where your customers will be able to sign up for the subscription to get the discount.

  • Edit the page and make sure to select the code view to paste your widget code!

  • Make sure the page is easily accessible to customers as this is where they will create their membership account to access the content/pricing.

Once you have the widget installed, you are ready to configure the custom pricing in the 3rd party app (like Wholesale Pricing). 

When customers add the subscription through the membership widget:

  • PayWhirl will create an account for them in Shopify with the same username and password they setup (if they don't already exist)

  • Tag them with the SKU of that plan. 

Note: The tags are applied after the first invoice processes. If you have a trial period or billing start date, that will delay the tags from getting added to Shopify until after the invoice is paid. 

You may also want to forward customers to a specific page on your site after they complete the purchase, instead of directing them to the customer portal. 

We also offer a customer portal widget that can be embedded on your site. Usually clients will embed this on a separate 'manage my membership" page on their Shopify stores. This way customers can manage their membership or update payment information.  

If the customer cancels their subscription the tag on the customer's account in Shopify is removed automatically, preventing any further discounts.

We also have dunning settings so you can control what happens if a customers payment fails. By default, the tags would remain active if a payment declines. However, you could adjust the payment decline rules to have it automatically cancel the customer's subscription on the first decline (which would remove the tags).

Please let us know if you have any questions.

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