Your membership plans control how members experience your program, from purchasing to accessing their perks.
Plan types
Play types let you determine how a customer becomes a member, and how their billing behaves.
- Membership: Customers buy access. You’ll link a product listing for a digital product that represents your membership — like a listing for “Insider club” or “VIP access”. (You can turn off inventory & fulfillment options for this!)
- Subscribe & save: Customers subscribe to a physical product, such as a coffee subscription. They can buy something once, or subscribe to get recurring deliveries.
- Loyalty: Customers can be gifted access to the membership plan, through:
- Manual action: Great for invite-only programs — memberships are assigned by staff from the “View customer” page (using an admin action).
- Shopify Flow: You can use a “Create membership” action to give earned memberships for lifetime spend, segment entry, and more.
- Account registration: When a customer registers for an account on your site, they can be gifted a membership to the plan (great to build an email list and identify prospective shoppers!).
Merchandising
If you sell access to your membership, you’ll need to decide what purchase options are available.
- One time payment: Make the product available to one-off orders, such as “lifetime access”, or for a single product delivery (for a physical item).
- Subscriptions: Use recurring billing to offer ongoing access, or recurring deliveries.
Let’s dig in a bit more on how these influence purchasing experience and how you add billing plans. We use the product price when possible so that Zendra maximizes compatibility with other Shopify apps or tools your business uses.
We inherit product price so you can use variants alongside subscription options (e.g. a coffee bag weight selector with billing intervals).
- One-time purchase will respect your perk expiry — if perks don’t expire, the membership is forever. If they expire, the membership will end after your access period (e.g. 1 year).
- Subscriptions: Product listings can offer subscription options (billing plans you’ve added).
- One time purchases will use the product price defined in Shopify still, if enabled.
- Billing plans will default to the product price as well (assuming it’s the price of the SKU / delivery), but you can override the price or offer discounts — for example, discounting more frequent deliveries to encourage buying more!
If you’re not sure what the best set up should be, don’t fret! You can change this later if your product page doesn’t work the way you want to, or our team will happily help you get set up.
Plan details
When you save a plan for the first time, Zendra generates a plan slug — a permanent internal identifier based on the plan name. You’ll see this slug in the plan page header (e.g., “gold-plan” or “vip-access”). The slug doesn’t change if you rename the plan later, which makes it a reliable reference for metafields, segments, and Shopify Flow automations.
Zendra also automatically creates a customer segment in Shopify for each plan — so you can target active members of a specific plan in marketing campaigns, email tools, and Flow automations without any manual setup. See Managing members for more on segments and metafields.
Perks
You can optionally add perks to any membership or subscription. Perks are digital access or discounts on your store. Sometimes a perk might be what you sell (e.g. you sell a membership that gives expedited shipping and 5% discounts), and sometimes they’re an add-on for a product — like giving coffee subscribers 5% off their other purchases or gift cards.
- Member content: Protect pages, blogs, articles, and more content on your site. If you protect content for members, it will no longer be visible to guests or non-members when they visit your online store.
- Product viewing & purchasing: Protect entire product listings so that only members can see them, or use listings as a teaser! You can make sure only members can purchase a product — this is a great way to give out early access to products, or only let members buy specific items or swag.
- Purchasing discounts: Give members automatic discounts on some or all products, or specific collections. You can even schedule these discounts to create “members-only” sales events.
- Shipping rates & discounts: You can give out 3 types of shipping perks. Each perk can be limited for only specified destination countries to protect potential costs.
- Free shipping: give members free shipping on their orders
- Discounted shipping: discount selected rates for members
- Exclusive options: only offer selected rates (e.g. expedited or freight shipping) to members
Integrations
If you’re on the Growth plan, your membership plans can also include integration perks that connect to external services. These appear in a separate Integrations section on the plan edit page.
- Discord access: Automatically assign Discord server roles to active members. You’ll need to connect your Discord server first, then add a Discord access perk to any plan. Each plan can assign different roles, so tiered plans can unlock different channels and permissions.