Recharge Loyalty rewards and benefits: Early or exclusive access to products and content

A common membership benefit is early or exclusive access to products and content. Grant early access to products or content such as members-only blog posts. You can also restrict access to products or content for your active members only. 

This guide provides instructions to configure your early or exclusive access to benefits and content. 

Before you start

• This benefit is only available for stores with a Paid membership program. 
• If the benefit in Recharge or the app embed are disabled, the experience will not be applied on the storefront regardless of the campaign dates. You can still add and edit campaigns when a benefit is disabled.
• To ensure eligible products for early or exclusive access cannot be purchased by non-members, the following is recommended: 
  • Do not add eligible products to a Features product template.

  • Disable the Enable quick add button on your storefront for templates such as Featured collection and Product grid. Instructions to disable the quick add button can vary by theme. Contact your theme developer if you need assistance.

How it works

These membership benefits allow you to create:

• Early access to products: Grant early access to the products in a Shopify collection for a specified amount of time.
  • Creating early access products or content will require you to create a campaign. A campaign is configured to specify the start and end dates that specific collections or pages can be accessed by members. 
• Exclusive access to products: Restrict access to the products in a Shopify Collection for active members only. 
• Early access to content: Grant early access to content such as members-only blog posts or articles for a specified amount of time. 
• Exclusive access to content: Restrict access to pages on your storefront for active members only. 

Step 1 - Add a new benefit

To add a new benefit: 

1. Click Loyalty then select Paid memberships in your merchant portal. 
2. On the Membership programs page, click See details on the membership you want to add access benefits to.
   
3. In the benefits section, click Add new benefit.
4. Choose a benefit from the drop-down and select Next.
   
5. Fill in the benefit name and optionally add a description. Choose if you want to enable the benefit. 

Step 2 - Create storefront settings

1. Under Storefront Settings, choose the storefront experience using the drop-down. Storefront components such as the pop-up modal or banner use the store's theme to determine styling for each experience.
   • Pop-up on page load modal with membership verbiage. Display a pop-up modal that overlays the page and will display on the specified collection page and the PDP for each product in the collection.
   • Redirect your customers to another page. Automatically redirect non-members to a specified URL and display a banner with messaging informing the customer why they were redirected. If you redirect the customer to a page outside of your Shopify Storefront, the banner will not appear.
2. Fill in the remaining information under Storefront Settings. Each storefront experience option will display different settings to configure. 

Step 3 - Configure benefit

The following instructions outline the different steps to take to configure each early or exclusive access benefit after the storefront settings have been filled in. 

Early access to products

1. Click Create a campaign to specify the start and end dates that a specific collection(s) can be accessed by members only. Note that date and time is applied in your store's time zone. 
2. Add a campaign name, then choose the dates and times for the campaign.
   
3. Select Add Shopify collections to choose the Shopify collection or collections to add to your campaign. Click Select to add a collection and confirm with Select collections. 
4. Select Create campaign to confirm.
5. Click Save.  

Exclusive access to products

1. Click Add collections to include a specific collection or several collections to your benefit.
2. Click Select on the collections to add and click Save.
   
3. Click Save to create your exclusive access benefit. 

Exclusive access to content

Once you've configured the storefront experience, you can then select specific pages that can exclusively be accessed by members. You can select one or more Shopify pages. 

Choose from these page types:

• Articles: This template is used for items like individual posts in a blog.

• Collections: Displays the selected collection page. If you choose to select a collection page, this will restrict non-members from accessing the collection page, but it will not restrict non-members from accessing the PDPs for the products in the collection unless you also select the individual product pages.

• Blogs: Blog pages are the homepage for any blogs that you create within your Shopify admin

• Pages: You can create custom pages in your Shopify admin to create content for your customers, such as an About Us page, or extra information about your products. 

• Products: Displays the product page for the selected product. 

• Templates: Templates allow you to apply the benefit to all pages that use the specified template. 

To select your content: 

1. To get started click +Add on the page type to update.
2. Click Select to choose the specific pages to display and Save. 
3. After you've added content for the benefit, click Save to confirm changes. 

Early access to content

1. Click Create a campaign to specify the start and end dates that a page can be accessed by members only. Note that date and time is applied in your stores time zone. 
2. Add a campaign name, then choose the dates and times for the campaign.
3. You can select one or more Shopify pages for a campaign. Click +Add on the page type to update.
4. Click Select to choose the specific pages to display and Save. 
5. Select Create campaign to confirm.
   
6. Click Save. 

Step 4 - Enable app embed

Once the exclusive access benefit is created and enabled, the exclusive or early access app embed will appear in your Theme Editor. This will need to be enabled and added to your storefront. 

To enable the app embed: 

1. In the Shopify Admin, click Online Store and select Themes.
2. Click Customize on the intended theme.
   
3. In the theme editor, click App embeds and Enable the early or exclusive access app embed for your store.
   
4. Save your changes.