Is it possible to implement membership pricing sitewide without an app?

[Paul_West]

I'm curious whether an app is 'needed' in order to do this. e.g. if a person makes an account and logs in, the whole site now shows different pricing on products, when you add to cart it adds at the new price, and this of course carries over to the checkout etc.

It seems the only way to do this would be to have multiple price fields per product in shopify which don't exist. Obviously you can't just fire off a javascript add-to-cart with a custom price otherwise anyone could hack the store and add-to-cart at $0. So it has to be a server-side thing presumably.

Is this why an app is 'necessary'? Something happens when I access product.price where, in the back end, some request callback talks to a server somewhere and gets a revised price and then forwards that modified price to the liquid code? (which I imagine is quite a slowdown if you're doing that often e.g. on a collection page).

Is there any way to do this kind of thing without an app and without having to duplicate products?

[Misfit_Code_Dev · Accepted solution]

The only way to do this would be an automatic discount, targeting a group of people with a specific tag.  Like Membership.  Then the discount will auto apply on the cart for the Percentage off. In theory a Dev could code it in to show that price if the customer with that tag logs in as well.

This would prevent though that any Membership people from using discount codes since you can only have 1 per cart.

[Paul_West]

Oh i see. Ok. Can the discount apply automatically without them having to use a coupon code, such that they could also additionally use a coupon code on top of the automatic discount?

[Paul_West]

I guess this answers it: "

CAN'T COMBINE WITH OTHER AUTOMATIC DISCOUNTS

Customers won't be able to enter a code if an automatic discount is already applied at checkout."

[Misfit_Code_Dev]

@Paul_West This is correct.  It would limit what can be done with discounts.  Alternatively there are apps that can do this.  Bolds Customer Pricing is a fave of mine.    There is also this app, which allows you to let customers use multiple discount codes.  I myself have never used this app before so i can not speak as to its use.  https://tabarnapp.com/customer-milestones-shopify/

[lanaredpbs]

Hey - I'm new to shopify and setting up the store for my community radio station.
How do you make the automatic discount target a particular customer group? 

We want to give our members a 10% discount that is automatically applied to the cart when they login but it doesn't give me an option to select customer group in the automatic discount settings. 

Do you need to get an external app for this? 

As a community station we have zero budget so paying for external things isn't an option unfortunately! 

Greatly appreciate any guidance!

[daniel-arena]

How can we implement targeting with automatic discounts? I don't see any option to provide a selection of customers in the DiscountCodeBasicInput.

[PaulNewton]

There are multiple ways to do this , it overlaps heavily with any method you'd use to do wholesale and some ways are similar to product bundling customizations

• Automatic discounts , see Misfit_Code_Dev's solution  ,easiest to implement with light coding or app,  tradeoff:  very inflexible marketing see [1][2]
• Variants and theme modification, tradeoffs: [2][3] 99 variant option can be hit quickly
• Product inventory is 2 sets with a heavily modified theme, tradeoffs: similar to a bundling customization and  [2][3][4] 
• Custom payment method and use Draft Orders, tradeoff: very manually time consuming without tooling [2]
• Custom Private App either by generating products,discounts, modifying orders 
• Membership|Discount|Pricing apps, tradeoff: evaluation & setup time , monthly fee
• Locksmith app 2 sets of inventory, tradeoff: setup time , monthly fee( if income generation > app cost just use it)
• 2 Websites, most sane clear separation of concerns once set up,  tradeoffs: needs apps to smooth daily operations  [4] 
• Shopify Plus Plan using wholesale channel
• Shopify Plus plan using shopify scripts for checkout
• And finally a contentious method of just issuing partial refunds , tradeoff: dont use with discounts or you can easily refund more than you were given

[1] Discount methods of course hit the limitation only 1 discount allowed per checkout so optionally use app to manage them or generate permutations of discounts that "stack" non-conflicting conditions.

[2] order verification issue, since a lot of the information is still in some ways accessible on the front end bad actors can theoretically figure out your scheme and submit an order there still needs to be a person or tool verifying correctness.

[3] Beware of automatic channels consuming "membership" product data

[4] Generally multistore setups needs apps or custom tooling to manage inventory sync and other daily tasks to scale efficiently or some good excel skills.

I'd really like for lists to be nestable 😞

[Stener1]

There is an improved way to do this now! This is an app, But only for The discounts in backend. Doesn’t affect your online store theme at all. It uses The new Shopify functions. We were trying to solve this for ourself with multiple different Members prices. The only One we found that handles it exactly as wanted is Discount Hub Unique Discounts 

The only thing that was missing for us was fixed amount on The «specific collection and customer tag discount» I sent an Mail to The developer and he worked extra hours to implement it The same evening!

Now we set it up this way:

-a product metafield «discount amount for Members»

- then an automatic collections with condition: metafield is exactly 5, 10, 15. (1 collection per amount)

-then we create automatic discounts in The app with collection: «Members discount - $10» and set fixed amount to $10 discount

-now we only have to Edit The value in The product metafields to manage The Members pricing.

you can also do this easily with percentage, instead of fixed amount if you prefer that.

[Jahid-KlinKode]

Hi @Paul_West, discover the process of restricting specific products or pages on your Shopify store through this insightful YouTube video: