Private sales on Shopify: create exclusive offers for your logged-in customers

Create exclusive offers for your logged-in customers

Are you a Shopify merchant looking to offer private sales exclusively to your logged-in customers?

Discover how to set up seamless and effective private sales for your visitors, while maintaining full control over access and the visibility of your exclusive offers.

Why set up private sales?

Private sales are an excellent way for merchants to create a sense of exclusivity and build loyalty with their most engaged customers.

Limiting access to special offers to a selected group not only makes these offers more attractive but also generates a sense of urgency and privilege.

These sales are an effective way to:

• Retain customers by rewarding their loyalty with exclusive offers

• Attract new visitors by encouraging them to sign up on your site and share their information (valuable emails for future newsletters)

• Clear out inventory while maintaining the perceived value of your products

• Boost the activity on your store

Creating private sales on Shopify

It’s entirely possible to set up private sales on Shopify that are accessible only to logged-in visitors.

This section walks you through the key steps, with a focus on two essential aspects: saving time and delivering a smooth user experience.

1. Start by creating a dedicated collection for your private sale and adding the relevant products. To restrict access to this collection to logged-in users, create a customer segment using Shopify’s filters.

The “ENABLED” filter helps you target active customer accounts. You can then group them by assigning a shared tag (e.g., “LOYALTY”).

2. To automate this process, use the Shopify Flow app to set up a workflow that automatically applies the “LOYALTY” tag to every active customer account, eliminating the need for manual tag management.

www.youtube.com/embed/398_MxqKKBY

Once your collection and customer segment are ready, create a discount code limited to this specific collection and make it available only to the “LOYALTY” segment. This ensures only selected customers will benefit from the exclusive offer.

Your private sale is now set up. But is it truly optimized from a user experience standpoint? That’s another question…

Optimizing the UX of private sales

By default, Shopify doesn’t automatically apply the discount code at checkout, which means the user has to manually enter the code before finalizing their purchase.

Fortunately, there is a solution to automatically apply this discount code in the cart and at checkout. This method involves modifying your store's code by creating a new ‘customer-discount.liquid’ snippet and adding the following code:

Add this code to your theme.liquid file just before the closing </body> tag:
{% render 'customer-discount' %}

After this modification, the discount code will be automatically applied when a visitor adds a product to their cart and proceeds to checkout.This method seems like an effective solution to improve the UX, but it’s not entirely optimal.

First, this approach limits the use of only one discount code at a time. In other words, you can apply only a single promotion to all products in your private sale collection.

So, you have two options:

• Apply a single discount amount with an automatic code,

• Or use multiple codes, but without them being applied automatically. In this case, clearly communicating the different codes to your customers can become complex and confusing, especially when explaining which products each code applies to. This can significantly hurt the UX.

Moreover, information about discounts is not visible on collection and product pages. Customers cannot see the discounted price of an item until they add it to their cart.

In the end, this leads to quite a few manual steps for a result that’s not truly effective.

But don’t worry! We have a solution that solves all these issues: Sales Genius.

Integrating Sales Genius

Sales Genius is an app that will allow you to create your private sales:

• By targeting only logged-in customers without having to manage segments or tags in Shopify.

• By creating multiple distinct promotions.

• By automatically displaying crossed-out prices end-to-end (on collection pages, product pages, cart, and checkout).

www.youtube.com/embed/63QBSMtxmiY

Visit the Shopify App Store to learn more about Sales Genius and enjoy a free trial!