Did you know you can now use Shopify to sell products with ActiveCampaign?
The Shopify and ActiveCampaign “deep data” integration is currently available for free to all ActiveCampaign users who are on a Plus, Professional or Enterprise level plan.
Throughout this step-by-step post we’ll show you how to use Shopify and Memberium for ActiveCampaign to sell and fulfill your own online course (that’s sold for a one time fee) with ActiveCampaign. The same steps covered here can be used to sell any type of digital product that’s sold through Shopify and ActiveCampaign.
It’s important to note, to be able to sell subscription based products with Shopify and ActiveCampaign, you’ll need to purchase a separate Shopify plugin to be able to do that. If you’re looking to sell subscription based products with ActiveCampaign, we’d recommend using Spiffy or ThriveCart instead.
With that said, here’s an overview of everything that’s covered throughout this article…
- An Overview of Shopify + ActiveCampaign
- What merchant accounts can you use with Shopify?
- How to create your products in Shopify and display a ‘Buy’ Button on your site or sell them through a Shopify Store
- How to set up your ActiveCampaign Automation to automatically generate a password and deliver access after someone purchases your online course through Shopify.
- How to test your Payment Process to Confirm It Works
An Overview of Shopify + ActiveCampaign
Shopify is one of the web’s most popular ecommerce platforms. It integrates with all major merchant account providers and allows you to customize the look and feel of your cart and order forms as you see fit.
You can combine the power of Shopify with ActiveCampaign’s powerful automation tools to be able to sell and fulfill your digital products on autopilot. ActiveCampaign’s deep data integration with Shopify allows you to connect all your Shopify ecommerce data inside of ActiveCampaign.
This means you can view a contacts past buying history and Shopify history in their ActiveCampaign contact record. The integration allows you to trigger off different automations based on their Shopify activity, for example based on what they buy or don’t buy from your store.
This allows you to do things like fulfilling their order automatically after they buy and emailing them how to access the product they just purchased. You can trigger off an abandoned cart sequence if they don’t buy something and you can send additional automated follow-ups to customers based on what they had purchased and much more.
Here’s an example of what a customer’s ActiveCampaign contact record looks like with the Shopify ecommerce data…
If they abandoned any items in your shopify cart, you’ll also be able to see that in their ecommerce history. You can easily trigger off an automation or any type of follow up after an abandoned cart event happens…
What Merchant Accounts You Can Use with Shopify
Shopify works with all major merchant account providers, you can check out the full list here….
If you don’t have your own merchant account yet and want to avoid the hassle of getting approved for one, to start selling quickly you can use Shopify Payments as an alternative.
It comes fully integrated with your Shopify store. To see the full list of countries that Shopify Payments supports you can check it out here…
You can also allow your customers to be able to pay online through other services like PayPal, Google Pay, Amazon Pay or Apple Pay.
With that said, let’s dive in and show you how to start selling your online course with Shopify and Memberium for ActiveCampaign…
How to Integrate Shopify with ActiveCampaign
- In your ActiveCampaign app, go to the ‘ActiveCampaign -> Settings’ screen
- Click the ‘Integrations’ option
- Click the ‘Add an Integration’ button in the upper right corner
- Select ‘Shopify’ from the list of available integrations to add
- Insert your Shopify store name. You must have an existing Shopify account so you can add your Shopify Store name in this step. If you haven’t already, sign up for your own shopify store. Then click the ‘Connect’ button.
- Once you’ll click the Connect button in a new tab you’ll get a warning notice saying that ActiveCampaign is not listed on the Shopify App Store. Click the ‘Install Unlisted App’ button at the bottom of the message to continue…
- Voila! Click the ‘Done’ button and your Shopify store and ActiveCampaign app are now integrated with each other.
- In your ActiveCampaign app, go to the ‘ActiveCampaign -> Settings’ screen
Create Your Product in Shopify
Before we go ahead and create your ActiveCampaign automation to deliver access to your course, you’ll want to create your product in your Shopify store and set the price that you want to sell your course for. To do this…
- Go to ‘Products’ in Shopify
- Click the ‘Add Product’ button
- Add all the settings and add your price as you see fit, then hit ‘Save’ button. Since you’re selling a digital product, you want to select the ‘Don’t track inventory’ option under the ‘Inventory > Inventory policy’ section.Also under the ‘Shipping’ section, be sure to uncheck the box that says ‘This is a physical product’ as shown in the below screenshot.
- Go to ‘Products’ in Shopify
- Once you have your product ready in Shopify, you need to embed it on your website to display it so users can be able to buy it. There’s two ways you can do this that you’ll have to decide on. You can either…
- Embed your product(s) through a ‘buy’ button that you’ll place on your website or sales page. We’ll explain how to do this in the next steps after this
- Or you can sell them through your own Shopify store. To do this you’ll just need to just link to your Shopify store from your website.
- To embed a Shopify product on your WordPress site, click the ‘More actions’ dropdown option then click the ‘Embed on a website’ option.
- You’ll be given some options as to how you want to display your product on your site. You can select your desired layout, then click the ‘Copy code’ when you’re ready.
- Now you can go ahead and paste this code onto the appropriate page on your WordPress site or place it on your courses sales page. After the code snippet is added where you want it, here’s a screenshot of how it will look to the end user.If you’d prefer to link directly to the product in your shopify store, you can do that to by copying the URL that leads to the product in your store. To do this right click the ‘View’ option, and select ‘Copy Link Location’ then link to that URL from your website as you see fit.
One drawback to this is after clicking through to this url, users will have to click the ‘Add to Cart’ button, and then ‘checkout’ to be able to buy the product. Which is a few more clicks they have to go through to be able to buy it when compared to embedding the product on your site.
Setting up Your Automation in ActiveCampaign
This is what will allow you to automatically deliver access to your online course (or digital product) via ActiveCampaign after they buy it through Shopify. Here we’ll show you how to automatically deliver access to your course with Memberium for ActiveCampaign…
- In your ActiveCampaign app, go to the ‘Automations’ section.
- Click the ‘Create an automation’ button
- Select ‘Start from Scratch’ option and click the ‘Continue’ button
- Choose the ‘Make a Purchase’ trigger
- Choose your Shopify store integration from the dropdown as shown in below screenshot. Also, check the box for segmenting user who purchase specific product.Click the ‘Ecommerce’ option.
- Select the ‘Product Name in Any Order’ option
- Enter the exact name of your Shopify product (exactly as it’s spelled in Shopify) that you’re selling and click the ‘Add Start’ button
- Next, you want to apply the correct Memberium membership level tag to the user after they purchase your product. After your ‘makes a purchase’ goal you’ll want to add a new action after to your automation to apply a tag, select the ‘Add a tag’ option under Contacts
- You’ll want to select the correct ActiveCampaign tag that you’re using for the Memberium membership level that you want to give them access to.If you’re unsure what tag you had used for your course, in WordPress go to Memberium > Memberships and click ‘edit’ next to the membership level you want to give them access to. On the next page you should see the tag name listed next to where it says ‘Access Tag’ like this. You’ll want to apply the correct tag in your automation sequence.
- After this, we’ll want to automatically generate a password for your users for Memberium for ActiveCampaign. To do this, add a new action to your automation by clicking the + sign as shown in the below screenshot…
- Select the ‘Webhook’ option as shown in below screenshot
- You’ll want to insert your own personalized password generator link. Copy your ‘Password Generator’ link from your WordPress admin dashboard by going to ‘Memberium -> Settings -> Web Hooks > Links > Password Generator Example’. Every site has their own unique password generator link, so be sure to use your own unique link here.
Paste your Password Generator link into the ‘Enter the URL to post to’ field and hit the ‘Save’ button - After this, add a new step to the automation and choose the ‘Send an email’ option under Sending Options tab. In this step we’ll send your new customer a welcome email with info on how to access the course they just purchased.If you’d like to use our own pre-written welcome email template, click here to download the template directly into your ActiveCampaign app to use for this. Or you can create your own email by following these steps…
- For creating your brand new welcome email click on the ‘create an email’ link
- Type in the suitable name for an email you’re creating so you can identify it in future and click on the ‘Create’ button
Add your own sender details and the subject line for the email and click the ‘Continue’ button - Now you’ll be prompted to a page where you can select an email template from ActiveCampaign’s pre-built template library
- Select a template as you see fit and write your welcome email. Again, if you’d like to use our own pre-written welcome email template, click here to download the template directly into your app to use.
- You can insert personalized details for the logged in user such as their first name, last name etc. using the ‘Personalize’ tab.Important: It’s important for the password field included in the email to match the correct field that you’re using to store your users passwords in your ActiveCampaign app. To insert your password field click ‘Personalize’ and select the field name that you’re using to store your password in.If you’re unsure which field you’re using to store your passwords, in WordPress go to ‘Memberium > Settings > Login Fields > CRM Password Field’. The name listed under ‘CRM Password Field’ is the merge code you’ll want to insert into your welcome email as your password.
You’ll also want to include a link to your sites login page.
- Below is a screenshot of what your ActiveCampaign automation should now look like…
If you want to add this ActiveCampaign automation into your app you can use this link…
How to Test Everything and Run a Fake Test Order With Shopify and ActiveCampaign
It’s always a good idea to test everything to make sure everything works as it should before you go live. Ideally you’d want to test with whatever payment provider you choose to integrate with Shopify for processing your payments.
Below are the steps how you can use Shopify Payments in test mode. If you’re using a different merchant account provider you’ll need to search for how to run test transactions through Shopify with them or how to turn your merchant account into some type of test mode.
To do this login to your Shopify account and go to ‘Settings’.
Under Settings go to ‘Payment Providers’
Click the ‘Edit’ button for Shopify Payments and select the box for ‘Use test mode’. You can go ahead and save the changes. The yellow border at the top is an indication that test mode is now activated.
Now you’re all set to make your test purchase. You can go to your product page on your website. And click the ‘Buy Now’ button.
On the next screen add all your info. For the email field, it’s important to note, DO NOT test with an email that’s the same email as any WordPress admin users on your site.
Type in any email that’s not used by any WordPress admin users in your site.
Pro Testing Tip: A simple tip if you have a gmail or google based email, you can type in a plus (+) with anything after it and it will be treated as a new email and still delivered to your inbox. For example if your email is james12@gmail.com, you can type in james12+testuser@gmail.com and it will delivered to your inbox like normal. You can type in any characters or numbers after the + and it will get delivered to you and treated as a unique email.
Using a test email that you have access to allows you to test your own welcome emails, just as your customers would get and make sure that everything is working as it should.
Once your done, click the ‘Continue to payment method’ button…
On the next screen you’ll need to enter some of the following test credit card details. If you’re using Shopify Payments as your merchant account, you can use any of the following test credit card numbers to complete your order.
If you’re using a different merchant account, please reference their documentation on how to run test orders. Or you can sign up for a free Shopify Payments account for testing purposes.
Below are some test credit cards that you can use for testing with Shopify payments. Please note that you can use any future date for the Expiration Date, and anything for the CVC or Zip Code.
4242424242424242 Visa
4000056655665556 Visa (debit)
5555555555554444 Mastercard
2223003122003222 Mastercard (2-series)
5200828282828210 Mastercard (debit)
5105105105105100 Mastercard (prepaid)
378282246310005 American Express
371449635398431 American Express
6011111111111117 Discover
6011000990139424 Discover
30569309025904 Diners Club
38520000023237 Diners Club
3566002020360505 JCB
6200000000000005 UnionPay
Type in any of those numbers and submit your order. You should then get a confirmation message that you’ve successfully completed the test order.
You can then search for the test order email address in ActiveCampaign and be able to make sure everything gets fired off correctly. Here hopefully you’ll be able to see the purchase was made successfully, the automation was triggered and they were sent the welcome email successfully.
After this step, you’ll want to make sure your welcome email works successfully. Check the inbox of the email that you used and test to make sure that a login was included in the email. Test the login that was sent and make sure you can successfully log in to your site and access the course.
Once you’re sure everything is working as it should, switch your merchant account back over to live mode and start selling your course!
In Conclusion
Shopify is a solid e-commerce tool for ActiveCampaign. It has a lot of other cool features like ability to add checkout links to your emails messages, social media posts or direct messages etc. which we haven’t covered in this article. You can read more about the Shopify Deep Data Integration with ActiveCampaign here that covers more about how you can use it.
We hope this article will help you to be able to start selling your course with Memberium for ActiveCampaign. Good luck selling and if you need any help along the way, please don’t hesitate to reach out to Memberium support for help.
Related ActiveCampaign Ecommerce Posts
- Spiffy for ActiveCampaign: How to Use Spiffy to Sell Subscriptions or Online Courses with Memberium for ActiveCampaign
- Top 5 eCommerce Platforms for ActiveCampaign – Compared
- How to use WooCommerce to Sell Your Membership Program Or Online Course with Memberium for ActiveCampaign
- ThriveCart + Memberium for ActiveCampaign Guide
