--- title: "Inner Circle | members-only buying on Shopify" description: "Run a members-only Shopify store without hiding it. Browsing stays open and indexed; buying sits behind an access code or a request you approve. For VIP drops." source: https://innercircle.monochrome.digital/ --- By Monochrome # Members-only buying on your Shopify store Browsing is open. Buying is by invitation. Inner Circle leaves your storefront browsable and indexed, so people still find you, look, and want it. Only buying sits behind an access code or a request you approve. Someone who can’t buy yet is still a lead. [Install on Shopify](https://apps.shopify.com/inner-circle) [See how it works](https://innercircle.monochrome.digital/how-it-works/) [Will it work with my theme, or my wholesale setup?](https://innercircle.monochrome.digital/contact/) Live on the Shopify App Store · Free plan, no card, no time limit · Flat monthly price, never a share of your sales **Prices hidden before paint** No flash of the real price **Decided on the server** Not a setting in the page source **Fails open** Our outage never blanks your store **Data in the EU** Frankfurt, encrypted at rest *A product page with the price replaced by ‘Price on request’ and two access buttons in place of the buy button.* A demonstration of what a locked product page does. Nothing here leaves this page. ![The Create lock screen in the Shopify admin. A "What this lock covers" card with a name and an "Applies to" menu set to All products, and a "How it looks while locked" card with the price set to "Hide the price entirely" and tick boxes for gating the buy button and showing the access code and request buttons.](https://innercircle.monochrome.digital/admin-lock.jpg) The lock behind that page, in your Shopify admin. Every choice the storefront above is making is one of these. How it works ## Two ways in. Use either, or both. Each path switches on and off independently in Settings. Run a quiet passcode launch one month, an application-only drop the next. 01 ### Access code A visitor enters a passcode and the buy button comes back. Codes can be shared with a whole audience, single-use so they burn on redemption, or capped by number of uses and by date. - Any number of codes live at once - Every redemption is attributed, down to which creator actually drove it - A one-tap unlock link, so nobody has to type anything 02 ### Access request A visitor builds an **interest list**, the cart’s stand-in on a store nobody can check out of, then fills in your form and submits. You either issue them a code, or turn their list into a Shopify draft order and send an invoice at your own pricing. - You build the form: any fields you want - Rules can let the obvious ones in without you - One click from request to draft order [The whole flow, step by step](https://innercircle.monochrome.digital/how-it-works/) Control ## Decide exactly what a locked visitor sees Set independently for every lock, so a wholesale collection and a public drop can behave completely differently on the same store. ### The price Show it, hide it, or replace it with your own wording: “Price on request”, “Members only”, anything you like. The lines themes print around it go too, including the instalments banner that otherwise states the price divided by four. ### The buy button Gate it or leave it. Which lock applies to whom is decided on our servers rather than in the page, so it is not a value somebody can edit. Where you gate it, Shopify refuses the sale at the cart as well — a direct cart link no longer walks past. Which locks that covers, and where it stops, is in the limits below. ### The way in Show the access code button, the request button, or both. They’re also a standalone theme block you can drop into a header, footer or landing section. Beyond the lock ## A door is the start of it, not the whole product Gating a page is the easy part. The work is what follows: deciding who gets in, when it opens, and which of your partners is actually bringing people. The plan each one needs is on the badge, so the tier boundary is not a surprise two pages later. ### Access tiers Growth Named, ordered levels instead of in-or-out. A code grants a tier; a lock can ask for that tier *and above*. Each tier writes a customer tag, letting Shopify segments and discounts key off “Gold” without knowing this app exists. ### Timed drops Growth Give a lock a start and an end. Before it opens, locked visitors see a live countdown and can ask to be told; when it opens, the content is simply open. No republishing, no staying up for it. ### The waitlist Growth When you’re full, people queue instead of bouncing. They see their position, and a referral link that moves them up it. The queue recruits for you instead of just holding. ### Auto-approve rules Starter Let the obvious requests in on their own, matched on country, email domain or the campaign they came from. The queue then holds only the ones you actually need to think about. ### The demand report Starter What the people who asked were asking *for*: the products piling up in interest lists that nobody has been let in to buy yet. The clearest signal a gated store produces. ### The creator scoreboard Starter Who is bringing people in. Every redemption carries its campaign, and “which creator was worth it” becomes a number, not an argument. [Every feature, in full](https://innercircle.monochrome.digital/features/) Being straight with you ## What Inner Circle is not This is a merchandising control, not a security system. We would rather say it here than bury it in the terms. - **The gate fails open.** During an outage or a network problem, the prices and buttons you meant to hide may be visible. That is deliberate: our problem must not blank your storefront. It is a real limit, not a caveat. - **The gate reaches the checkout, but not from every lock.** A shopper without access can no longer buy a locked product, even holding a direct cart link: Shopify refuses it at the cart. That covers locks that name their products and locks covering the whole store. It does not yet cover locks pointed at a collection, or at conditions like a tag or a vendor — those are still storefront-only — and a lock you set to hide the price while leaving buying open is left alone on purpose. A price may likewise be readable from a cached copy, a search result, a product feed or another app. - **Withdrawing access is not instant at the checkout.** Revoke someone and the storefront closes to them immediately. The checkout can lag behind: a shopper carrying a code can hold a valid pass for up to about a day and a half before it expires. If somebody must be stopped at once, remove the product from sale rather than waiting on the pass. - **Theme support is best effort.** We ship broad selectors and a field for your own, but we can’t guarantee behaviour on an unusual theme. Check yours. The full version of all of this is in the [Terms of Service](https://innercircle.monochrome.digital/legal/terms/). Who it’s for ## Three of the five stores that need a door ### [The drop](https://innercircle.monochrome.digital/use-cases/#the-drop) A dated launch with a countdown, a presale waitlist behind it, and VIP early access codes that go out the moment it opens. ### [The collaboration](https://innercircle.monochrome.digital/use-cases/#the-collaboration) One code per creator, each redemption attributed. You negotiate the next contract against real numbers. ### [The trade catalogue](https://innercircle.monochrome.digital/use-cases/#the-trade-catalogue) Public enough to be found and indexed, closed enough that retail visitors never see trade pricing. [All five, with how to set each one up](https://innercircle.monochrome.digital/use-cases/) ## Further reading The longer version of the problems this page solves, written for the problem instead of for the product, including the places where the answer is not this app. ### [How to hide prices on Shopify](https://innercircle.monochrome.digital/guides/hide-prices-on-shopify/) Every way to stop a price showing to the public: theme edits, customer accounts, the password page and gating apps. Which one fits which problem. ### [Wholesale pricing without a second store](https://innercircle.monochrome.digital/guides/wholesale-pricing-without-a-second-store/) Running a trade catalogue on the same storefront as your retail one: what Shopify gives you, what it does not, and where a gate is the simpler answer. ### [A members-only store Google can still find](https://innercircle.monochrome.digital/guides/members-only-store-google-can-find/) How to build one in six steps, why hiding a shop from everyone also hides it from search, and how to keep the shop window open while the till stays shut. ### [The Shopify password page, and when it is the wrong tool](https://innercircle.monochrome.digital/guides/shopify-password-page-alternative/) Why Shopify cannot password protect a single page, the three jobs the built-in password page is genuinely good at, and what to use for the rest. ### [How to password protect a page on Shopify](https://innercircle.monochrome.digital/guides/password-protect-a-shopify-page/) Shopify has no per-page password, so here are the three things people mean by it, how to build each one, and which of them is real protection. ### [Shopify access control apps, compared](https://innercircle.monochrome.digital/guides/shopify-access-control-apps-compared/) Fourteen apps that gate a Shopify storefront, on the five questions that separate them: the flash, the outage, requests, cost, and whether free means free. ### [Running a private sample sale on Shopify](https://innercircle.monochrome.digital/guides/running-a-private-sample-sale/) Invitation-only, time-boxed, or both: single-use codes that survive being forwarded, and why the sale collection is the one thing worth hiding outright. ### [Influencer campaigns on Shopify, and knowing which one worked](https://innercircle.monochrome.digital/guides/influencer-campaigns-on-shopify/) Why discount codes measure creator campaigns badly, what changes when the incentive is access instead of money off, and what makes attribution hold. ### [Shopify B2B, and the case it does not cover](https://innercircle.monochrome.digital/guides/shopify-b2b-when-its-not-enough/) What company accounts and catalogues give you on every paid plan, the one thing they assume, and how to tell whether you need anything else at all. ### [Klaviyo for a gated Shopify store](https://innercircle.monochrome.digital/guides/klaviyo-for-a-gated-shopify-store/) A gate collects addresses faster than an open shop, and most of them are not yours to market to. Which ones are, and how to keep the four kinds apart in Klaviyo. ### [Running a drop on Shopify](https://innercircle.monochrome.digital/guides/running-a-drop-on-shopify/) VIP early access, presale waitlists, countdowns and what to do with the people who miss it: the mechanics of a launch that builds a list instead of spending one. ## The questions this raises **Does it work with my theme?** 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. **What happens if your servers go down?** 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. **Can someone get around it with devtools?** 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. **Will a price flash on screen before it’s hidden?** 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. [All 15 questions](https://innercircle.monochrome.digital/faq/) ## Ready to put a door on it? Inner Circle installs from the Shopify App Store in a couple of minutes, and nothing on your storefront changes until you turn the app embed on. [Install on Shopify](https://apps.shopify.com/inner-circle) [Watch it work first](https://innercircle.monochrome.digital/tutorial/) [Ask whether it fits your store](https://innercircle.monochrome.digital/contact/)