Memberships

Memberships let you reward specific customers — usually your subscribers — with perks like automatic discounts, free shipping, and a set number of complimentary items per period. Once a customer qualifies for a tier, their benefits apply automatically at checkout and at POS whenever their email is recognized.

This article covers what's included in a membership tier and how to set one up.

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What Memberships include

A membership tier is made up of five sections:

1. Basic Info — internal nickname and a customer-facing display name.
2. Membership type — who qualifies: subscribers only, or all customers.
3. Customers segment — the rules that decide which customers fall into this tier (subscription contents, customer tags, or both).
4. Benefits — the perks members receive (product discounts, free shipping, usage-based discounts).
5. Customer tags — Shopify tags automatically applied to qualifying customers, which you can use in other apps and Shopify workflows.

Each tier has a status of Draft, Active, or Archived. Only Active tiers grant benefits.

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Setting up a membership tier

1. Basic Info

2. Membership type

This is the most important decision — and it cannot be changed once the tier is created.

Subscribers only (most common)

• Builds the tier from subscription contents, optionally narrowed by customer tags.
• Use this when you want to reward people for being active subscribers.
• Will not include any customer who has never had a subscription.

All customers

• Builds the tier from customer tags alone.
• Use this when you want a tier that's open to non-subscribers (e.g. wholesale, VIP, employees).
• May require additional Shopify segment setup to get an accurate member count.

3. Customers segment

Define who qualifies. The available options depend on the membership type.

Subscription contains (Subscribers only)

Choose what a customer must be subscribed to in order to qualify:

• All subscriptions — any active subscription qualifies.
• Specific products — only subscribers to the products you list (e.g. Seasonal Favorites).
• Specific variants — only subscribers to specific product variants.

Customer tags (optional for Subscribers only, required for All customers)

Toggle on to layer customer tags onto the rule. When tag options are defined, the segment is the customer's subscription contents AND the included customer tags.

4. Benefits

Turn on any combination of three benefit types. All benefits are applied automatically at checkout and at POS once the customer's email is recognized.

Product discounts

Automatic member pricing on eligible one-time products. Subscription items are excluded — subscription pricing is managed through your selling plans, not memberships.

Choose a Discount strategy:

Each discount tier has:

• A Display label shown to the customer (e.g. "Member discount").
• A Discount %.
• A product/variant/collection/type selector for that tier.

Click + Add another discount tier to stack as many tiers as you need.

Free shipping on all orders

A simple toggle. When enabled, qualifying members receive free shipping on every order.

Usage discounts

Grant members a set number of discounted or complimentary items per period — for example, 4 complimentary tastings per quarter or 2 free bottles per year.

For each usage discount tier, configure:

• Discount % (use 100% for fully complimentary items).
• Usage count — how many uses the member gets per period.
• Strategy — products, collections, or product types the allocation applies to.
• Reset schedule — when the allocation resets:
  • Calendar year — resets every January 1.
  • Rolling frequency — every X weeks / months / years from the member's qualifying date.
  • Specific days — exact reset dates you specify (e.g. Jan 1, Mar 15, Nov 1).
• Optional daily limits to cap how many uses a member can redeem in a single day.

Usage discount balances are tracked per member and decremented as they're redeemed at checkout or POS.

5. Customer tags

Available for Subscribers only memberships.

Automatically apply Shopify customer tags (e.g. SeasonalClub) to anyone who qualifies for this tier. Use these tags in:

• Other apps that read Shopify customer tags
• Shopify Flow automations
• Shopify discount targeting
• Email segments (Klaviyo, etc.)

Tags are retained if a customer still qualifies for another tier that shares the same tag — they're only removed once the customer no longer qualifies anywhere.

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Status: Draft, Active, Archived

Activate a tier from the Status menu in the top-right of the tier editor. When activating, you can choose to backfill — retroactively enroll existing customers who already match the segment.

To retire a tier, scroll to the bottom and click Archive membership tier.

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How benefits are applied

• Online checkout — benefits apply automatically via Shopify Discount Functions. Customers see the Display label you configured.
• POS — benefits apply when staff look up the customer (or the customer's email is otherwise recognized).
• Subscription orders — product discounts apply only to one-time items on the order, not to the subscription line items themselves.

No discount code is needed. If a customer qualifies, their pricing is correct at checkout.

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Tips and gotchas

• Membership type is permanent. Pick Subscribers only vs All customers carefully — to switch, you'll need to archive the tier and rebuild it.
• Order your tiers. The Memberships list is drag-to-reorder. If a customer qualifies for more than one tier, the order determines precedence.
• Use Draft for staging. Build the tier in Draft, verify the configuration, then activate (with or without backfill).
• Customer tags do double duty. They're both a segment input (who qualifies) and an output (auto-applied for downstream use). Don't confuse the two.
• Usage discounts ≠ product discounts. Product discounts are unlimited and percentage-based; usage discounts are a metered allocation that resets on a schedule.
• Subscription items are excluded from product discounts. If you want member pricing on subscription items, configure it through your selling plan instead.