What we shipped.
Alva Courses is a Shopify app that lets merchants build, sell and deliver online courses natively inside their store. This page is every feature, fix and improvement we've shipped — reverse chronological, newest first, no marketing gloss. Built for merchants who want to see exactly what's changed, when, and why it matters.
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Certificates
A certificate per variant
Issue a different certificate for each variant of a course’s product, such as one per credential or track, from one course with one roster. Pick a variant under the course on the Certificates page and design its certificate: students who buy that variant are given it when their order is paid, and everyone else gets the course design. You can change any one student’s design from the Access deadline window on their member page. Issue a different certificate per credential or track.
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Members
Manual enrolment approval
Decide who gets into a course. Turn on Approve purchases manually before granting access in a One Time Purchase course’s Settings → Pricing & access, and each new buyer joins the course as Awaiting approval: the thank-you page, their customer account and the course list say so, and the course stays locked until you approve them, one at a time on their member page or in bulk from the course’s Members tab. When you approve, access begins, drip timing and any Access Duration count from that day, and the usual enrolment email goes out. Existing members keep their access, and two optional emails can tell buyers their purchase is waiting and alert you to each new one. Approve purchases before students get access.
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Integration
Shopify Sidekick
Ask Shopify Sidekick, the AI assistant in your Shopify admin, about your courses and students. It can look up courses, members, a student’s access and progress, enrolment lists, completion counts, work waiting for review, email send attempts, lesson titles and course readiness — all read-only, so asking never changes your data. Sidekick can also draft changes to a course’s enrolment email, which you review and save yourself; it can’t enrol or remove students, change access or edit courses. It’s on for every store on both plans, with no setup. Get started with Sidekick.
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Automation
Shopify Flow templates
Six ready-made Alva Courses workflows are now in Shopify Flow’s template library. Install one from Create workflow → Browse templates, add your details and turn it on: tag customers who complete a course, email yourself when a student fails a quiz, post new lesson comments to Slack, enrol customers when you tag them, log quiz results to Google Sheets, or award Rivo loyalty points for a completed course. See all six templates.
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Content
Contact form block
Add a Contact Form block to a lesson so students can ask you a question without leaving it. They send from their existing account, with no name or email to type, and every message is saved in a new Messages inbox in the app, where you can filter by course, archive and reply by email. Email me new messages starts switched on, so each message also lands in your inbox and replying goes straight to the student; save a default address under Settings → Email Settings → Contact forms. It’s on both plans, and Shopify Flow gains a 13th trigger, Course contact form submitted, for messages from students with a Shopify customer account. Add a contact form.
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Automation
Shopify Flow triggers and actions
Alva Courses now works with Shopify Flow on both plans. Twelve triggers start a workflow when a student enrols, completes a lesson or a course, has a quiz graded, comments, submits coursework or has it evaluated, receives a certificate, loses access, or nears or passes an access deadline. Seven actions let any workflow enrol a customer, revoke, extend or set their access, resend the access email, send a certificate, reset progress or look it up. Course IDs and recent Flow activity are in Settings → Integrations → Shopify Flow, a Restore access button on the member page undoes a Flow revoke, and the Help Centre has step-by-step workflow recipes.
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Content
Alva File Storage + the File block
Unlimited Pro stores now get 10 GB of Alva File Storage for course files, separate from the 50 GB video allowance. PDF, Audio, Image, EPUB and MS Office blocks gain an Alva File Storage tab beside Shopify Files, lifting the per-file cap from 20 MB to 500 MB and delivering every file through a signed link that expires instead of a public URL. A new File block offers any file type as a download button on every plan, and a Files page in the app shows the library and storage meter. Existing lessons are untouched.
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Grading
Course grading and evaluation
A course can now require you to review a student’s work before it counts as complete. Tick Require manual evaluation before completion in the course’s Settings tab, on the Certificates card: submitted work is frozen and queues for you in the app menu, where you award a grade with written feedback or send it back to Revise and resubmit. Grades use the recommended A–F scale or your own letter bands, and students see their grade and any feedback you mark as visible, attempt by attempt — the certificate and completion email wait until the work passes. You can also read and reply to reflections from the course’s Actions → Reflections, and mark Short Answer and Long Answer quiz answers by hand with Review Responses, with partial credit. Turn on course evaluation.
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Certificates
Grades on certificates
Print the grade a student earned on their completion certificate. Add a Grade element in the certificate layout designer — the design needs a background image first — in a per-course design or your store default. The grade comes from a passed evaluation, so it only prints on courses with manual evaluation turned on; elsewhere the element stays blank, and it never prints quiz scores. The grade is fixed when the certificate is first generated. Add a grade to a certificate.
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Email
Monthly progress digest
A monthly email that sums up each student’s progress across the courses they own at your store: courses still in progress with their percentage complete, and courses finished that month, up to five of each. It’s off until you switch it on under Email Templates → Monthly digest, which needs your business postal address first; you pick a send day from the 1st to the 28th in your time zone, and every email carries an unsubscribe link. You can also hand-pick up to six published paid courses to suggest — each student sees at most three they don’t already own, and only if they’re subscribed to email marketing. Set up the monthly digest.
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Members
Contact properties
Store your own named values on a member — a cohort, an employer, a licence number — in the Contact properties card on their member page. Bring them in from a CSV by ticking the extra columns at import, get them back out as
attr:columns in the member export, and merge them into enrolment, completion and digest emails with{contact.your_key}. Names use lowercase letters, numbers and underscores, 3–64 characters long, with up to 100 property names per store. How contact properties work. -
Content
Shopify Product block
Put a live Shopify product card inside a lesson so students can buy kits, materials or another course without leaving it. Add it from Add Content → Shopify Product in the lesson editor and show up to 12 products as a Card, Banner, Compact, Grid or Inline link layout, with Add to cart, Buy now, both, View product or no button. Price and stock are live, variant and quantity selectors and sold-out handling are built in, and purchases go through your store’s normal cart and checkout. Products must be published to the Online Store channel, and Buy now isn’t available for subscription products. Add a product to a lesson.
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Email
Custom email domain + dark-mode email preview
Send enrolment and certificate emails from your own domain instead of alvaapps.com. Add your domain in Settings → Email Settings, verify it with the DNS records we provide, and every message lands with your sender identity. The template editor now also includes a live dark-mode preview, so you can see exactly how your branded email renders in dark inboxes before students receive it.
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Video
Alva Video Hosting
Upload course videos straight to Alva Video Hosting and stop fighting Shopify's native file caps. Pro stores get 50 GB of dedicated storage with no 1 GB / 10-minute-per-video limit, so you can publish long-form lessons and high-resolution masterclasses without re-encoding or third-party embeds. Included on Unlimited Pro.
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Quizzes
In-lesson quizzes
Build quizzes inside any lesson to check what students have learned. Drop a Quiz block into the lesson editor, add your questions, and pair it with "Require completion before next lesson" so learners pass the assessment before they can move on.
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Certificates
Completion certificates
Award a custom-designed certificate automatically the moment a student finishes a course. Design the certificate once and students can download it from the course. Switch on the certificate email and edit its template to match your brand, and Alva Courses also emails each graduate their certificate on completion — no manual sending.
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Scheduling
Drip scheduling and scheduled publishing
Pace your course. Drip lessons and whole sections a set number of days after each student enrols, or schedule an individual lesson to publish on a future date. Keep work-in-progress lessons as Draft and reveal them on your timeline, not all at once.
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Members
CSV import/export and global members
Manage every student in one place. Bulk-import members from a CSV, export your full roster, and add members manually. A new global Members view spans all courses with search and filtering, so you can see who's enrolled where without opening each course.
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Storefront
Native storefront course player and customer-account extension
Students now learn without ever leaving your store. The customer-account extension adds "My Courses" to the Shopify account, and lessons play in a branded storefront course player with a sidebar lesson list, a progress bar and completion ticks. No second login, no external platform.
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Community
Per-lesson discussions
Turn courses into communities. A native comment thread lives on every lesson, where you can reply to students and remove posts. Switch on email notifications under Settings → Email Settings to get an email whenever a student comments, so questions never go unanswered.
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Delivery
Thank-You and Order Status extensions
Get students learning the instant they pay. The Thank-You page extension lets buyers start their course straight after checkout, and the Order Status page extension gives them a reliable place to reopen it — alongside the enrolment email.
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Content
Rich lesson content blocks
Build lessons from a full set of content blocks: rich text with tables and formatting, video from YouTube, Vimeo or Loom, plus images, PDFs, audio, ePub, MS Office documents, Zoom links and buttons. Mix and match to create exactly the lesson your topic needs.
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Access
Course access deadlines
Set an access window on a paid course, or a deadline for an individual student. Alva Courses tracks each deadline and shows it on the member page. Access is not cut off automatically unless Alva support has switched on deadline enforcement for your store — while it's off (the default), the student can still open the course after a deadline passes. To end someone’s access, remove them from the member page, fully refund the course line, pair membership-tag access with your subscription app, or use Shopify Flow’s Revoke course access action.
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Progress
Progress tracking and completion analytics
See how every student is doing. A per-course Members Overview shows total members, active enrolments, completed students and completion rate, with a progress bar and enrolment date for each learner so you know exactly where everyone stands.
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Email
Branded enrolment emails
Welcome new students with an email that looks like yours. Customize the from-name, subject, title, message, footer and login hint, and add a "Start Learning Now" call-to-action that drops students straight into their first lesson.
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Builder
Drag-and-drop course builder
The first public release of Alva Courses on the Shopify App Store. Build courses from sections and lessons, reorder everything by dragging, and duplicate, rename, move or delete with a click. Connect a course to a product and sell it through your existing Shopify checkout.
Ready to sell your first course?
Install Alva Courses on Shopify in minutes. Drag-and-drop builder, native storefront player, quizzes, certificates, drip scheduling and branded emails — all inside your store. Every paid plan includes a 14-day free trial.