While you may be aware of the more standard membership perks, such as limiting access to certain buttons or pages, and member discounts, beneath these common perks is a section for Alternate Templates. These perks may not be as well-known and intuitive as the others, so this article will be dedicated to helping with understanding them.

In simple terms, Alternate Templates are used if you want to show different types of customers different versions of pages in your online store. For instance, a type of page non-members will see will look different from the one your paying members will see. All of these templates are configured in similar ways.

So for example, if you were to select product, aka product page, you will receive an additional dropdown where you can choose from among the different product page template files currently in Shopify.

Each of the alternate templates will have different files associated with them. These templates are not set in stone; you can edit existing templates and even create new ones in one of two ways.

These can be accessed from your Shopify Admin > Online Store > Themes. Click the button next to Customize, then select Edit Code.

The product template corresponded to these 3 .json files towards the bottom here (screenshot below). You can make edits to these files to make changes to the corresponding pages on your website, or create new templates altogether here (using Add new template towards the top of the panel).

This second way requires much less technical knowledge.

Navigate back to the Themes section and click the Customize button for your store theme to bring up the editor.

Click on this dropdown menu in the top bar to reveal the different parts of your store. Since we are dealing with the product template, we will choose Products. Now you’ll see the different templates currently available. You can also click to create a new template here.

If you do, you will need to name it, then select an existing template to base the initial look of this new template off of.

Regardless of whether you chose to edit an existing template or create a new one, you can make customizations using the left panel of the customization section.

Just as a simple example, we have moved the location of the product price to below the buy buttons.

Click to Save the template in the upper-right when you are done.

So now you can now return to the Membership Perk page and assign the new or updated template to your plan.

Click to Save when you are done.

You can test this in your storefront with an account that has this membership plan active. This product page, for example, currently shows the base page layout, as we are not logged into a member account.

Now, log into a member account in your store and revisit the product page to see the members only version of the same product page.

So hopefully you now have a better understanding of how Alternate Templates work in Appstle Memberships.