How to Create a Shopify Membership Site and Restrict Access to Your Shopify Store

Question: Can Shopify natively prevent customers from seeing website content until I approve them?

Answer: No, but it’s easy to do with the use of third-party apps like Customer Fields and Locksmith.

Creating a membership or wholesale website on Shopify is an extremely popular online business model. Here you’ll learn how to overcome the most common problems merchants experience while setting up and launching a membership site on Shopify.

Common problems when creating Shopify membership Sites

1. Collecting customer information:
   You can’t collect additional information from customers or approve accounts in Shopify. Shopify’s tutorial only allows you to save custom data to the customer note field, which prevents you from putting this data to use.
2. Locking unauthorized customers out: You can’t lock out unauthorized customers from certain parts of your store, like products, collections, and navigation items, with Shopify.

Solution: Give access to approved customers on Shopify

1. Use Customer Fields to create a unique registration form to collect important information from your customers
2. Enable account approval so you can review and approve customers
3. Automatically tag customers (like: “B2B”, “Membership”, or “Wholesaler”) who complete your registration for
4. Install an app like Locksmith to restrict access to the entire store, certain products, collections, menu items, etc. based on customer tags

Following the steps above with tools like Customer Fields and Locksmith allows you to customize and limit access to your site. Let’s now talk in a bit more detail about they work together:

Collect customer information

Use customer fields to:

• customize a registration form
• collect important information from customers
• organize/segment customers
• manage customer tags

Each of these features helps you see and sort customers easily.

Lock unauthorized customers out

To restrict access to your store, you will either need to use an app like Locksmith or hire a Shopify developer to write custom code. Many guides (like this one) demonstrate how to hide products or collections using Liquid code (usually based on customer tags), but no code solution is “one size fits all”.

We recommend using the Locksmith app. It’s a powerful and flexible tool specifically built for access control. It just so happens to pair perfectly with Customer Fields too.

Members-only login pages, passwords & much more

We just shared one of a thousand examples on how to restrict access to your Shopify store. Whether you want to build a membership-based login page, or password protect your site, you’ll need a tool like Customer Fields to manage unique customer data and automate customer tagging since these features are not available natively in Shopify.

Browse our help center for all things Customer Fields, and reach out to our Support team via chat or email if you need any guidance.**