Shopify is built for transactional commerce. A customer arrives, selects a product, checks out, and leaves. The platform handles that sequence well. What it does not handle natively is a tiered pricing model where the price a customer sees depends on their membership status, updated consistently across every product page, collection, and cart interaction, without any manual intervention between the member’s login and the discount appearing.
Just Human wanted to launch a membership program offering a flat 10% discount across eligible products. The commercial logic was straightforward. The technical execution was not. Shopify does not have a built-in membership layer. There is no native mechanism to recognise a logged-in member, apply member-only pricing site-wide, and maintain that pricing through to cart and checkout without the customer or the operations team doing anything to trigger it. Any gap in that chain, a product page showing the wrong price, a cart that does not reflect the discount, a membership product appearing in the cart of someone who is already a member, creates confusion at exactly the moment a customer is deciding whether the membership is worth having.
The cart behaviour problem was particularly specific. On first purchase, the membership product needed to be added to the cart automatically during registration. For existing members returning to buy again, that same product needed to be automatically removed, because a customer being asked to purchase a membership they already hold is not a minor friction point. It is a trust failure.
