Alliance Pro lets you power your pro programs all in one place, giving you control over discounts, applications, specialty group memberships, program renewal reminders, and more. In this article, you’ll find comprehensive, step-by-step instructions to setup your pro program.
Create a member group
From your dashboard, click Create member group. This will bring you to the Member groups page.
Choose a Name and Description for your group.
The Group ID will help you if you’re setting up custom workflows for this member group. You can use this ID when setting up a segment or flow, basing your workflows around it.
Setting a Discount limit will let you set the maximum total discount a member can receive per membership period. Once the customer exceeds this amount, their account will be suspended for the remainder of the membership period.
Discount limits are not enforced at checkout. If you have a customer that is close to their discount limit and adds products to their cart that exceed the limit, they can still place the order. After the order is complete, Alliance Pro will detect that they exceeded the limit and suspend their account for the rest of the membership period.
Create a discount
In the dashboard of the app, click Create discount. From here, you can set a Member group discount title. This will be for your records only, it won’t display to your customers.
The Discount tiers section is where you’ll specify the important criteria for your discount.
Start by defining a Message. This will display to your customers at the checkout, so it’s best to use something they’re familiar with.
Under the Customer eligibility drop down menu, select the member group you want this discount to apply to. Then, assign the discount percentage, and select the collections it will apply to.
You can also add another tier by clicking Add tier. You can have multiple tiers for your discounts; an example of the use case for this would be a brand that runs one pro program with multiple member levels, each getting different pricing.
Students get 10% off a basic gear collection
Instructors get 20% off on a broader set of products
Ambassadors or VIP pros get 30% off or access to the deepest discount tier, etc.
Next, review the Discount Application Strategy. By default, the setting will be set to All, but you can customize which order you want your discounts to appear in. This is applicable if you have multiple discount tiers.
First: Only the discount whose conditions are met first is applied
Maximum: Only the discount with the maximum reduction is applied
All: All discounts whose conditions are met are applied (recommended for multiple discount tiers)
Finally, if you choose to allow your customers to combine discounts, you can do that under Combinations.
With discount combinations, you can specify what other types of Shopify discounts your Alliance Pro discount can be combined with. Click here to learn about best practices and different scenarios for combining discounts from Shopify.
Then, click Save discount in the bottom right.
Reviewing applications
Reviewing the test application will give you a preview on how your applications will come through. On the dashboard, click View test application.
From this view, you’ll see all applications under All. You can monitor the status of the applications from here, or click over to the Pending view to move through the pending applications one by one.
Alliance Pro Test is a test customer added by our app as an example. Click on the Applicant name to be brought to the Applications page.
The Applications page will display the information captured from your application form. Scrolling further down this page, you’ll see the Status section. Click Send response to approve or reject pending applications. You can choose to send a reason for approval/rejection or mark the application as approved/rejected without sending a notification. If you leave the box unchecked, no notification will be sent.
You can add internal notes in the Timeline section.
Setting your preferences
In Alliance Pro → Preferences, you can further customize your application form and the information that goes along with it. Under App proxy, select your store’s theme architecture so the app proxy applies the right styling:
Online Store 2.0: Modern Shopify themes with sections on all pages, JSON templates, and app blocks.
Vintage: Older themes built before Online Store 2.0. These may require more manual adjustments.
Custom / Non-standard: Heavily modified or fully custom themes that don’t follow standard Shopify architecture.
The Member URL is how your customers will access the application form. By default, the app proxy member URL will be /apps/alliance-pro after your store name. If your store name was your-store, the app proxy member URL would be your-store.myshopify.com/apps/alliance-pro. In the Preferences section of the app, you’ll see this URL generated for you, and you can click the Copy button to copy the URL to your clipboard.
You can customize this URL in your Shopify settings. Go to Settings → Apps → Alliance Pro, and then scroll down to the App Proxy URL area.
Click Customize URL to change your URL. Enter the text you wish the URL to be (using a hyphen between words if there are more than one) and then click Save. As a best practice, we recommend choosing something that matches your program name (ex: ‘application’, ‘pro-program’, etc.)
Changing the App Proxy Url in the Shopify settings will be reflected on the storefront. It will not change the default Member URL in the app, so be sure that this is the URL to send customers going forward.
Back in Preferences, under Application form, you can enter your Terms and conditions as well as your Pro program policy. The text you enter here will be displayed on the application form for customers to read through prior to submission. Filling these fields out will also implement a checkbox for customers to click, acknowledging they’ve read it. You can also ask for a File upload and set it as a requirement.
In Notifications, you can specify how your notifications are sent to customers. By default, Alliance Pro sends the notifications from ‘Alliance Pro’ and [email protected]. When a customer responds to an email from this sender, it will be forwarded to your account owner email, or to the email address specified in the Staff email section.
If you wish to customize the sender of the email notifications (so that the emails go to customers from your store rather than Alliance Pro) the best way to do this is by integrating with Klaviyo or Mailchimp to manage notifications there. Under Customer notification method, click the dropdown menu to switch the notification method to your third party email service. Clicking on Klaviyo or Mailchimp will open up a section for you to complete the integration.
In Customer notifications, you’ll see a list of the type of notifications we send. These include:
Application approved: Sent to the customer when their application has been approved.
Application received Sent automatically to the customer after they have applied.
Application rejected Sent to the customer with a message indicating why their application was rejected. You can edit the message to the customer before you send it.
Membership expired Sent to the customer when their membership expires.
Membership invited Sent to customers when they are imported or manually added. New Shopify customers created during the import will receive an account activation URL in the email.
At the bottom of the page, you can customize the Auto-approved membership message. This is what will be sent to customers if you have an auto-approval setting. Once they fill out their application, they’ll be sent this email notification and will appear as approved in the app admin.
Add the app block to your theme
Depending on your pro program, you may want prices and discounts shown to your customers. To do this, you’ll want to add the app block to your theme.
From the app dashboard, under Storefront pricing display, click Add app block.
You’ll be brought to the theme editor, where you’ll see the Membership price show up at the bottom of the Product information. You can reposition this on the left side of the editor by dragging it to the area that suits you best.
When customers aren’t logged in, they’ll see the Membership price display “Log in to preview membership price”. After they’ve logged in, they’ll see the name of the Member group they’re part of.
In this same area of the editor, you can also make some customizations to how the discounts display. Click on Membership price on the left, and then you’ll see the options to customize.
Test the customer experience
Before launching the program, test the customer experience to make sure everything is working. You can give your customers access to the application through the app proxy URL, which you can either provide directly to them as a URL to access or by adding it to a menu on your storefront.
You can either send the URL to your customers to directly access, or add it as a page link in your menu on the storefront.
When customers click your URL, they’ll be brought to a page where they must log into their account. Once they’ve logged into a customer account, they’ll be able to view the application form.
After logging in, customers can go back to the app proxy URL to start an application.
After clicking Start an application, customers will see your application form to enter their information.
After their application is approved, customers will be able to see the discount they qualify for when logged into their account. If you’ve added the app block to the product page, discounts will also display there.
Test the customer experience by logging in as a customer in a Member group, adding products to the cart, and moving to the checkout. Look out for whether discounts are applied as expected and, if not, contact our support team through the chat widget on the bottom left of your app admin.
Receiving applications
After your customers fill out the application form, they’ll receive an email confirmation that the application has been received. By default, the notification sender for the email will display as Alliance Pro with the email address [email protected]. You can customize this by integrating with Klaviyo or Mailchimp, where you can customize all email notifications and sender emails.
As a merchant, you’ll also receive a notification when an application comes through.
