HowNOT2: Bolting+ Membership Program on Shopify

Most of HowNOT2's catalog gets bought once. Bolting hardware doesn't.

The climbers who replace and install bolts buy the same category over and over — often in volume, often on a club or organization's budget. They were the store's most predictable customers and they had no particular reason to be loyal to it. Every order was a fresh decision they could make somewhere else.

Bolting+ was the answer: a $99/month membership giving that specific group a standing 20% off every product in the bolting collection. For a customer buying bolts and hangers at any real volume, the math pays for itself immediately — which is exactly why the pitch had to happen at the moment they could see that math.

A savings teaser, not an ad. As shoppers add bolting products, the storefront shows what this exact cart would cost as a member. The pitch is arithmetic the customer is already doing in their head, surfaced at the moment it's persuasive.

A spend-triggered join prompt. The invitation appears only once a cart crosses a level where membership obviously pays for itself. Below that line it stays quiet — pitching a $99/month membership to someone buying a single hanger is just noise, and noise is how you teach people to ignore a UI.

Backend entitlement. I built the logic that identifies an active member and applies the collection discount automatically at checkout. No codes, no manual order edits, and no way to get member pricing without a membership.

In-context theme integration. The teaser, the prompt, and member pricing all render on product and cart pages, rather than living on a separate marketing page nobody visits.

Bolting+ runs at roughly 2,500 members on a $99/month subscription.

The store converted its most frequent — and least locked-in — buyers into recurring revenue, and turned a category it was already winning on into a reason to keep coming back. The discount logic runs itself: no codes to issue, no manual order edits, no support tickets about a code that didn't work.