About our Shopify app
SheerID created a Shopify app (called Insta Student Discounts) to provide a simple, no-code way to quickly launch new gated offers in Shopify stores.
It takes mere minutes to launch. You can choose your target audience, create the program, publish it to your store, and start inviting store visitors to get verified for your offer.
Target Communities
We offer the ability to extend discount offers to seven community types - Military, Students (US and international), First Responders, Teachers, Healthcare, Seniors, and New Movers.
Country & Language support
The app includes support for 37 languages and 193 countries globally within the student community. Our other communities have US and English support at this time.
Customer Buying Journey
SheerID is pre-purchase. The brands we work with have moved towards offering the verification and discount outside of the purchase flow. Shopify’s checkout is notoriously gated and you don't want to highlight the discount to someone who is already willing to pay full price.
We recommend publishing a landing page for your offer, with the verification form included in that page. This gives you lots of flexibility for when and how to drive traffic to your offer, since you can link directly to the page. We also recommend adding a link to this landing page in your site footer; it’s important for your brand satisfaction that potential customers who have heard about your offer through word of mouth can find it.
How Offers work with Shopify
When using the Shopify app, you will be asked to define whether your offer includes a Discount or a Tag. You can select either of these options alone or you can choose to include both of them.
- If you include a Discount, the app will automatically create the discount in your store and generate a set of single-use discount codes. A code will be handed out to each customer who is successfully verified. The customer can use that code during checkout to apply the discount to their cart.
- If you include a Tag, any customer who gets successfully verified for the offer will have the relevant tag applied to their record in the Shopify CRM. You can use this tag to help segment your customer base for future marketing campaigns and/or defining other store behaviors.
Discount Codes
SheerID recommends using discount codes as the redemption strategy when offering a discount, as it is the only way to support all purchases, including guest checkouts.
The app supports you defining:
- The Discount value, as either a percentage off of the order total or a set discount amount.
- An optional minimum purchase amount.
- An option to limit the discount to specific products or collections.
When you click Save, the app automatically generates a Discount in your store (also called a priceRule) and automatically generates a pool of single-use discount codes. When used during checkout, single-use codes will apply the current Discount definition to the cart.
The set of discount codes is automatically managed - as they are given out, more are created so you will never run out.
Evergreen vs Limited-time discounts
Most customers choose to have evergreen offers, meaning that they are available all the time. In these instances, codes generated by the app do not have an expiration date. After a customer verifies and gets a code, they can use that code at any time now or in the future.
If you are providing a limited-time offer, then you can use Shopify’s native functionality to modify the discount definition to have a specific end date. Every unique discount code linked to this Discount object will have this end date applied.
To add an end date for a Discount, follow these steps:
- Open your store
- Click on Discounts in the left-hand menu
- Find and click on the applicable SheerID discount (the discount name will be the same as your program name in the SheerID app)
- Scroll down to the Active dates section
- Check the box to set an end date
- Define the desired date and timestamp
- Click Save
Using a discount code
By default, all programs created through the SheerID Shopify app after December 13, 2022 will show a "Use code now" button to verified customers. Clicking this button automatically applies the code to the current shopping session. Your customer will see the discount applied when they reach the Checkout step in your store. Alternatively, a customer can copy their unique code and paste it into Checkout step.
Older programs can adopt this one-click functionality via the following steps:
- Log in to my.sheerid.com
- Open your program
- Navigate to the Text step
- Add a redirectUrl, of the format “https://” + shopName + “.myshopify.com/discount/${rewardCode}”
- Click save
Customer Tags
Typically, customer tags are used because a brand wants to be able to segment SheerID-verified customers for marketing efforts and/or to apply automated rules to the behavior of their Shopify store. Customer tags can be used in combination with a Discount or as a standalone offer definition.
To set up a tag, follow these steps:
- Open the SheerID app
- Open an existing program (or create a new program)
- Go to the Offers step
- Check the box to add a tag
- Declare which tag you want to use
For marketing activities, make sure to include tags the next time you pull a customer list from the Shopify CRM. For other website behaviors, you then need to define that behavior using Shopify's native automation options. For more information, see Shopify's documentation about customer tags.
If you choose only to include tags and will not be giving out discount codes, make sure to update your program's Success messages accordingly, as you'll need to instruct the verified customer on what you want them to do next. We call this account linking. See our article on account linking best practices for further guidance.
In order for customer linking to work properly, it is imperative that SheerID knows exactly which customer record to tag for each successful verification. If you set up a Tag in the SheerID Shopify app, your program will automatically be set to make 'customer_id' a required metadata field. The SheerID app block and javascript snippets will automatically pass the Shopify 'customer_id' to SheerID when the SheerID form is loaded. If you're using an alternative publishing method, you will need to ask a developer to pass the customer identifier into the SheerID form as metadata. For more information about this, see our article on account linking best practices.
Brand look and feel
The app makes it simple for you to style new offers. When you first install the app, it will copy and save relevant parts of your store's theme. When you create new programs, those programs will use the saved theming so that the verification form looks like a natural part of your brand.
Within the app, you can optionally upload your logo to the verification form.
If you want to further customize the styling of the form - or the tone of voice - you can log in to my.sheerid.com to do so.
Publishing your offer
After you have your offer set up, it's time to give your verification form a home, then you can make your offer available to your store visitors. We recommend creating an offer landing page and, at a minimum, adding a link to that page in your store navigation.
Note: Installing the app and creating new offers has no noticeable effect on your store until if / when you take action to publish your offer. Therefore, after install, you can quietly create new programs and try things out, without any site visitors being any the wiser.
Offer landing page
We recommend publishing a landing page for your offer, which describes the offer value, any caveats, and invites a customer to verify by filling in SheerID's verification form. Having that page gives you lots of flexibility for when and how to drive traffic to your offer, since you can link directly to the page.
The Shopify app offers 4 options:
- The super simple route is to use the pre-built landing page that SheerID makes for every customer. This has been popular amongst our Shopify app users. Learn more.
- The app integrates with Shopify's App Blocks functionality, to give you a no-code way to insert the verification form on a page that you create and host. Learn more.
- If you're not using Shopify's native page builder functionality, and are comfortable copy-pasting some javascript code, you can embed the form anywhere on a page you create and host. Learn more.
- Similar to option 3, you can apply the modal snippet to a button on a page you create and host. Learn more.
See these real-world examples
App blocks
To create an offer landing page within Shopify, you need to create a new page type in your Theme Editor. Use the app block within the theme editor to add SheerID. Then you can create a new page, using the special offer landing page them, to publish that page to your site. See Shopify's documentation.
If you have the Insta Student Discount app installed, when you go to the theme editor you will see a section for SheerID. It will list all of the programs you created in the app (if you don't yet have a program, first navigate to the main app and create one, then come back to the theme editor). Select the program you want, and then choose the embedded vs modal display style.
Note: The app block makes it easier to set up account tagging offer definitions, because it will automatically pass the customer identifier to SheerID, whenever the customer is already logged in to your store.
You'll want to apply your usual high-converting design to the landing page, such as a nice hero image and a compelling description of the offer. It's also a good idea to provide any information a customer may need to know about limitations to the offer, or any special instructions for redeeming it.
Launching the offer and making it visible
When you are ready to launch, publish the landing page (if applicable) and link to the page from your site navigation. Only at that point will the new program become visible (and available) to any customer.
We highly recommend adding a link to this landing page in your site footer; it’s important for your brand satisfaction that potential customers who have heard about your offer through word of mouth can find it.
Publishing multiple offers
If you are setting up programs for multiple communities (such as students and teachers), we recommend creating 1 landing page per community and distinctly adding a link to your site navigation for every community. This enables you to authentically engage with each community. For example, if your social media manager is active in discussions with online teacher communities, they can easily link to the teacher landing page on your store. Having that landing page be very targeted to teachers will be very clear and high-converting.
Alternatively, you can choose to create a single landing page and put all your offers on that page. Only go this route if the offer value is identical to all communities. We also recommend in a single page that you use the Modal version of displaying the forms - having multiple verification forms embedded in a single page will feel overwhelming to a visitor.
Alternative ways to publish
If you want to go fully bespoke, and have engineering resources at your disposal, SheerID offers a Javascript Library and set of REST APIs. This means that rather than using SheerID's form in an iframe, you can collect the necessary customer information yourself, in your own way, and submit it to SheerID behind the scenes. See SheerID's developer center.
Promoting your offer
After your program is launched, make sure to promote your offer.
Program reporting
The Shopify app is focused on creating and publishing your discount programs. All management of campaigns and reporting are accessible through the customer portal found at my.sheerid.com. You will see reporting to understand conversion, advertising channels (through UTM codes), and verification performance.
After you log in, you’ll see Reporting in the left navigation. Click that. The visual reporting dashboard shows you a summary of all your programs. You can apply filters to analyze your data. To download a csv of all your data, click the Download button in the top right corner.
Note: to see PII (personally identifiable information) in the downloadable report, you will need to have the ‘Customer Data’ user permission. If you don’t have the option to include PII in the report, then in the left nav click on Settings, then click on Users, and edit your user to include the ‘Customer Data’ permission. Log out of my.sheerid.com, then log back in and go back to downloading the report.
MySheerID
The Shopify app is complementary to SheerID's customer portal found at my.sheerid.com.
When you first install the SheerID app, you are prompted to register a new MySheerID account. This will be the login you use for both the app and our MySheerID customer portal.
When a new account is created, we send an email to set your MySheerID login password. You can either go find that original email we sent, or trigger the password reset process. If you ever have issues logging in, our Product Support team is happy to help (productsupport@sheerid.com).
Working with Coworkers
For the Shopify app, if a coworker has permissions to see Shopify apps, then they can use the SheerID app without any additional setup. The only requirement is after the app is installed, someone needs to do the login or register step, so that your store is linked with the appropriate MySheerID account; once that linkage is done once, it is persistent. No-one will be asked again to log in to the app unless the app is uninstalled (and re-installed).
For MySheerID, you will need to invite your coworkers to join your account. To do this, log in to my.sheerid.com, click on Settings in the left navigation, then click on Users. Enter the email address of your coworkers and click Invite. They’ll be sent a welcome to SheerID email - they need to click on the button in that email to set a password and finish the (very quick) user creation.
The verification journey
In most cases, customers are verified instantly.
If the customer supplies data (name, school, organization, etc.) on the form that doesn't match instantly, the customer will be prompted to upload a document to prove they are who they say they are (school ID, class schedule, paystub, etc). In these cases, SheerID provides 24/7 document review and our average response time is less than one minute.