Frequently asked questions

No, and that’s the point. Your storefront stays browsable and indexable. Only buying is gated, and even then only where you set a lock. A visitor who can’t buy yet can still fall in love with the product and ask you for access. Why the wall belongs at the till rather than the front door.

A password page hides everything from everyone, including search engines, so nobody new ever finds you. Inner Circle leaves the shop window open and puts the door on the till: people browse, get tempted, and either enter a code or ask you for one. There is a longer answer in the guide to the password page, including the three jobs it genuinely is the best tool for.

No. The app writes CSS into the page head that hides prices and buy buttons before the theme paints anything, and reveals the page only once the gate has answered. The lines themes print around the price (“Tax included”, “Shipping calculated at checkout”, the instalments banner) go with it, because that banner otherwise states the price outright, divided by four.

Your storefront keeps working and reveals itself unlocked after four seconds. We chose that deliberately: an outage on our side must not take your store offline. It does mean hidden prices can become visible during one. That is why we call this a merchandising control, not a security system.

They can make the button reappear, and you should plan for that rather than be surprised by it — but what it gets them is a button. Every gate decision, code check and request is handled on our servers behind Shopify’s cryptographic verification, so nobody edits themselves into a tier or forges a redemption. And where the lock is one Shopify enforces at checkout, the sale is refused at the cart, so a hand-built cart link ends in a rejection rather than an order. That covers locks naming their products and locks covering your whole store; a lock pointed at a collection or at conditions like a tag is still a storefront control and stops there, as is a lock you have set to hide the price while leaving buying open. If our check cannot run at all, Shopify completes the sale rather than hold up your customer. Where a product must be unbuyable under every one of those conditions, unpublish it.

It works on all Online Store 2.0 themes, and on older themes that run JavaScript. We ship selectors for the widely used themes, and Settings → Theme compatibility takes your own selectors for anything heavily customised. Test your own storefront after setting up. Yours is the only theme that matters.

Yes. That’s what access tiers are. You name and order the levels, a code grants one, and a lock can require a given tier and above. Each tier also writes a customer tag, so Shopify segments and discounts can act on it without knowing this app exists. Tiers are on the Growth plan.

Yes. Give a lock a start date and locked visitors see a live countdown and can ask to be told when it opens; give it an end date and it closes on its own. Once a drop has opened, the reminders go out on the next daily send, so the queue you built beforehand hears about it without you writing anything. Scheduling is on the Growth plan.

They join the waitlist instead of bouncing. They’re told where they stand, and given a referral link that moves them up it, so the queue recruits for you instead of just holding. Releasing people from the queue is never blocked by your plan, even if you downgrade with hundreds waiting.

They do, and you’re right about Shopify: it offers apps no general way to email a customer. So Inner Circle sends the customer-facing mail itself: access codes, unlock links, request confirmations and drop announcements. The sender name is your shop and replies go to your address, so only the technical address behind the name is ours. Anything that can’t be delivered is shown to you in the admin to send by hand, never silently dropped, and on Growth you can send through your own SMTP server or Resend account instead.

In the European Union, in Frankfurt, encrypted in transit and at rest. When you uninstall, everything belonging to your store is permanently deleted 48 hours later, so export anything you want to keep first. The detail is in the Privacy Policy.

You already have one. Our Data Processing Addendum, including the Standard Contractual Clauses, forms part of your agreement the moment you accept the terms. There is nothing separate to sign.

You’re the controller of their information, so your own privacy policy and cookie notice should mention the app. We’ve written wording you can copy and adapt, covering both.

There are three plans: Free, which never expires, then Starter at $14.99 a month and Growth at $34.99, both with a yearly option that saves 17% and both with a free trial. Those are US dollars; the App Store listing (opens in a new tab) shows them in your own currency. Everything runs on Shopify Managed Pricing, so trials, mid-cycle changes and currency are Shopify’s to deal with and charges land on your Shopify invoice. Development stores get every feature free, permanently.

They go on locking. Downgrading never takes a private catalogue public, because an access-control app that unlocked your store when you stopped paying it would be doing the one thing it exists to prevent. What a cheaper plan stops is letting people in on a schedule or by level: a lock ignores its dates and stays on, and stops asking for a tier. The dates and tiers themselves are kept, so moving back up resumes them. Your data stays for as long as the app is installed. The pricing page spells this out in full.