Locksmith
Install LocksmithContact us
  • Quick Start
  • 💡Basics
    • A Locksmith Overview
    • Creating locks
    • Creating keys
    • Compatibility with other apps and Shopify features
    • Removing Locksmith
  • 🔆Tutorials
    • Approving customer registrations
    • Creating restricted wholesale products
    • Hiding product prices and/or the add to cart button
    • Selling digital content on Shopify
    • More tutorials...
      • Setting up multiple price tiers
      • Customizing messages
      • Customizing the customer login page
      • Customizing the registration form
      • Customizing the passcode form
      • Customizing Locksmith’s "Access denied content" messages, and redirecting customers
      • Customizing the email list signup form
      • Showing multiple prompts on the same page
      • Showing content only to specific Markets
      • Input lists
      • Protecting against bots
      • Earn recurring revenue on your exclusive content using ReCharge
      • Use Locksmith and PayWhirl together to grant access based on subscriptions
      • Liquid locking basics
      • Restricting checkout from the cart
      • Confirmation key condition
      • Restricting customers to a specific collection
      • Passcode-specific redirects
      • Grow your subscriber lists with Klaviyo
      • Use Klaviyo as an access control list
      • Use Mailchimp to collect customer emails
      • Hiding out-of-stock products
      • How to use a private browsing session
      • Granting access to variants by visitor input
      • Offering different variants by postal code
      • Locking products by tag
      • Locking multiple pages at once
      • Making a product accessible exclusively from the direct product link
      • Creating private team areas
      • Importing customers in bulk
      • Disabling Locksmith for certain theme files
      • Adding translations to your Locksmith messages
      • Redirecting using Locksmith
      • Locking variants
        • Limiting the scope of variant locks using the product tag key condition
        • Handling JavaScript DOM errors caused by variant locks
      • Locking the customer registration form
      • Locking the search results page in your store
      • How to clear cache for a single website
      • Disabling Locksmith for certain theme files
      • 🛠️Manual mode
      • Grant access for a limited time when using passcodes or secret links
      • Testing Locksmith on unpublished themes
      • Locking blog posts
      • How to access your browser's dev tools
      • Restricting the cart for mixed products and combinations of products
      • Locking products by vendor
      • How do I hide my Shopify store's header and footer
      • Hiding navigation links for locked resources
      • Hiding products from product-grids
      • Restricting a product so that it can only be purchased by new customers
      • Automatically managing the seo.hidden metafield using Locksmith
      • Locking the home page
      • Setting up checkout validation with Locksmith
      • How to hide theme sections, blocks, and snippets
  • 🔑Keys: Access methods in Locksmith
    • About key conditions
    • Customer account keys
    • Passcode keys
    • Secret link keys
    • Visitor location keys
    • More about keys...
      • Inverting conditions in Locksmith
      • Combining key conditions
      • "Has purchased..." key
      • Using the "Force open other locks" setting
      • Liquid key basics
      • Manual mode
      • Excluding content from locks
      • IP address keys
      • Newsletter keys
      • Limiting the scope of variant locks using the product tag key condition
  • 🌻FAQs
    • Why aren't my locks working?
    • FAQ: I see blank spaces in my collections and/or searches when locking
    • Can Locksmith hide content from my in-store search?
    • Locksmith is not working with my page builder app
    • What should I do if my site is loading slowly?
    • I'm the administrator of my site and I cannot access pages because of Locksmith locks.
    • More FAQs...
      • I'm having trouble using Locksmith with a site speed optimization app.
      • The app isn't loading. What do I do?
      • Can Locksmith protect shipping methods, billing methods, or coupon codes?
      • I switched themes, and Locksmith isn't working
      • Why isn't my passcode, secret link, newsletter, or location key working?
      • Can Locksmith lock Shopify's public JSON API for my online store?
      • Why are my customers seeing a reCAPTCHA when logging in?
      • My passcode or newsletter prompt is not updating on my store when I change it.
      • My featured collections on my home page only show one product.
      • My infinite scrolling doesn't show all of my products.
      • My customers have to enter their e-mail address into the Mailchimp key every time they visit.
      • How do I know which customers have used a certain key?
      • Why is Locksmith adding information to my orders?
      • Locksmith isn't installing correctly!
      • Locksmith is not uninstalling correctly!
      • How does Locksmith affect search engines and SEO?
      • How do I change where customers are redirected to after registration on Shopify
      • The thing I want to lock isn't showing up in the Locksmith search
      • I am getting an "already taken" error when trying to create a metafield definition for seo.hidden
      • How do I add a hero banner image to Locksmith's access messages
  • 📒Policies
    • Usage agreement
    • Locksmith's pricing policy: Pay what feels good
    • Privacy policy
    • Data policy
    • Contact us
  • 🔦Developer Tools
    • Locksmith Admin API
    • Locksmith Storefront API
    • Locksmith variables
    • Unsupported functionality
    • Requests from Locksmith
  • More developer docs...
    • Using the Admin API with Locks
  • App Integrations
    • Easy Appointment Booking
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On this page
  • Step 1: Create your restricted content
  • Step 2: Create your "access product"
  • Requiring a simple one time purchase
  • Requiring a recurring subscription charge for access
  • Step 3: Setting up the lock
  • Step 4: Making sure your customers are signed in when purchasing your "access product"
  • Optional: Directing customers to your content after purchase
  • ... in order confirmation emails
  • ... and in the order confirmation page, after checkout
  • Use Case: Defer access to the restricted product until some time after the required product is purchased.

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  1. Tutorials

Selling digital content on Shopify

How to use the Locksmith app to sell digital content on Shopify

PreviousHiding product prices and/or the add to cart buttonNextMore tutorials...

Last updated 2 months ago

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If you have special content that you want to monetize, and it lives in your Shopify store, Locksmith allows you to sell access to it via in-store purchases.

Note: Selling digital content on Shopify might mean different things for different merchants. If you are simply wanting to sell digital files that are sent to customers via email, .

Step 1: Create your restricted content

Common choices for this are to add your restricted content to one of the following:

  • . Keep in mind that you are not restricted to a single blog, so you can have a general access blog for your site news, etc, and still use a restricted blog for your digital content.

  • .

  • Product page - You can build custom product templates that also house your restricted content and combine it with , so that the restricted portion only reveals itself after the product has been purchased. This option has a less straightforward setup, but is still available if desired. If this is you, the best place to start is by contacting us via email at team@uselocksmith.com.

Again, for best results, your content should live in your online store. However, there are some other options that might apply to you:

Secure file viewing or downloading

This requires another provider, and we recommend Dropbox: .

Secure video viewing

You can embed the videos to be viewed just like any of your other content. However, if you want to secure this process, you'll need to enlist the help of a third party video viewing service. We recommend private and unlisted videos on Vimeo, but keep in mind that making your videos private/unlisted on Vimeo requires a paid Vimeo plan! .

Other general content that doesn't live in Shopify

If your content must live elsewhere, consider using iframes to embed your content into a Shopify page, which you can then lock. This is more of an advanced technique and would require someone familiar with code. Locksmith support won't be able to code this kind of thing for you. This is also less secure because the original source of the iframe can't be locked by Locksmith.

Step 2: Create your "access product"

Requiring a simple one time purchase

You'll need to have at least one product that is clearly marked as the product that customers will purchase, in order to gain access to the locked content. Something like this:

Requiring a recurring subscription charge for access

You'll need to use a third party app to set up the subscription service. We recommend ReCharge or PayWhirl, and we have in-depth guides for those here:

Step 3: Setting up the lock

Step 4: Making sure your customers are signed in when purchasing your "access product"

In order for Locksmith to register that a customer has actually purchased your "access product", it is important that you require that customers are actually signed in when the purchase is made.

You can do that with either of the following ways:

Optional: Directing customers to your content after purchase

You may wish to direct customers to the content that they just purchased.

... in order confirmation emails

We can use some custom code to conditionally add a link to your locked content if the customer has purchased the right product.

To set this up: head to Settings -> Notifications in your Shopify admin, then select "Customer notifications" and click the link for "Order confirmation". To edit the code for this email, you'll need to click the "Edit code" button in the top right of the page. Insert this code and adjust as needed:

{% for line_item in line_items %}
  {% if line_item.title == "Some Product" %}
    <p>Thank you for your purchase! You may now access <a href="https://awesomeco.myshopify.com/pages/some-locked-page">this locked page</a>.</p>
  {% endif %}
{% endfor %}

Feel free to add multiple copies of this code, if you need to send the customer to one of several pages.

... and in the order confirmation page, after checkout

The code above can also be modified to suit the order confirmation screen that your customers see, right after completing an order.

To set this up, locate the "Additional content and scripts" box, near the end of the Settings -> Checkout area in your Shopify admin.

Use this code:

{% for line_item in order.line_items %}
  {% if line_item.title == "Some Product" %}
    <p>Thank you for your purchase! You may now access <a href="https://awesomeco.myshopify.com/pages/some-locked-page">this locked page</a>.</p>
  {% endif %}
{% endfor %}

... adjusting the "Some Product" for your actual product title, and "/pages/some-locked-page" part for the address to your locked content.

Feel free to add multiple copies of this code, if you need to send the customer to one of several pages.

Use Case: Defer access to the restricted product until some time after the required product is purchased.

Let's say you want to grant access based on the purchase, but not immediately. You can grant access later using two conditions in your key. For example, this key will grant access 12 weeks (84 days) after the purchase of the Starter Pack:

on your subscription product (the one created in the previous step). For your key, use the condition labelled "has purchased..." to create a key condition that permits access if the customer has purchased the appropriate product:

Note: You can also specify a time window, using the option labelled "Only look for orders in the last...". With this, you could require - for example - that the customer has made the purchase within the last 365 days. This is a good way to limit the access period time, but you should still if you want an automatically recurring charge.

Make customer accounts required for your entire store: This means that everyone must be signed into your store when they check out. . This might be considered overkill for some merchants, so if that's the case, use the next option.

Use Locksmith to require that a customer is signed in when purchasing your "access product": Pretty simple - just add a lock directly to the "access product" and use "Permit if customer is signed in" as the key condition. You can by editing the "Guest message content" message to let the customer know that they need to sign in before access. Or, if you prefer, you can even if you just want to hide the add-to-cart button instead of the whole page.

Notice the "unless" in the first condition. That's the result of using the option. :)

🔆
see Shopify's guide on this here
Shopify's built-in blogging engine for your store
Pages - Shopify's built in webpages for your store
Locksmith's manual locking
Get started with this on Dropbox' website
Get started with this on Vimeo's website
Create a lock
More information from Shopify on doing this
edit the locked landing page for this product
employ manual locking
invert
use a recurring subscription app
Earn recurring revenue on your exclusive content using ReCharge | Locksmith
Use Locksmith and PayWhirl together to grant access based on subscriptions | Locksmith
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