How-to

Contact properties

Contact properties are name-and-value pairs you attach to one member in Alva Courses. They are yours to define — a licence number, a cohort, an employer — and they travel with the member into your CSV export.

Add a property to a member

1. In the Shopify admin, open Alva Courses, go to Members, and open the person.
2. Scroll to the Contact properties card.
3. In the Property field, type a name or pick one your store already uses from the suggestions.
4. Type the Value, then click Add property.
5. To change one later, edit its value and click Save; to remove it from this member, click Delete.

Naming rules

• Lowercase letters, numbers and underscores, starting with a letter, 3 to 64 characters. A value can be up to 5,000 characters.
• A few names are reserved by the CSV importer and cannot be used: email, first_name, last_name, and any course_1-style name.
• A store can hold up to 100 distinct property names. Values are unlimited — the cap is on how many different names you invent.
• Suggestions come from the names your store already uses, so the same property stays spelled the same way on every member.

Import properties from a CSV

You do not have to type them one at a time. In Bulk Import Members, any column your CSV carries that is not part of the member import appears under Extra columns. Tick one to import it as a contact property; leave it unticked and it is ignored. Names that do not fit the rules are adjusted, and you are told which.

Export them

Every property name your store uses becomes its own CSV column, headed attr: followed by the name — so licence_number exports as attr:licence_number. They are listed under Contact properties in the export column picker, so you can include all of them, some of them, or none. See export members to CSV.

Use them in an email

Every property you store becomes a placeholder you can drop into a course email. In the template editor, Insert Variable lists a {contact.your_key} entry for each key your store uses, alongside the standard course and customer placeholders — so an enrolment or completion email can open with a student's cohort or employer. Write the key in lower case with underscores. A student with nothing saved for that property gets an empty space rather than the placeholder text, so a line that depends on a value every student has is safest. See edit your email templates.

Who can see them

Only you. Properties are stored per store, so a customer who buys from two merchants using Alva Courses never carries one merchant's notes into the other's member page or export. Students never see the member page or the export, and a property only ever reaches a student if you put it into an email yourself with a {contact.…} placeholder. They are erased with everything else on a customer erasure request — see customer data requests.

See also

See import members with CSV, export members to CSV, or view members and progress.

Last updated 2026-09-07