How progress tags work
With progress tags turned on for a course, every student enrolled in it carries one of three Shopify customer tags from the moment tagging starts for them, kept up to date automatically. The tags are built from the course’s tag name: if the tag name is watercolour-101-42, they are alva-not-started-watercolour-101-42, alva-in-progress-watercolour-101-42 and alva-completed-watercolour-101-42. A student is only ever counted in one of the three.
Enrolled is not the same as started. A customer who buys the course and never opens it carries the not-started tag, and normally so does one who opens a lesson, watches the video and leaves: a lesson has to be marked complete before anyone counts as in progress. The exception is a Bunny Stream video block with Mark the lesson complete when the video ends ticked. That setting is off unless you turn it on, but where it is on, playing the video to the end marks the lesson complete and moves the student to in progress — worth checking before you build an audience of students who have not watched anything. The completed tag arrives when the student finishes the course — on a course that requires a passing quiz score, that means passing the required quizzes as well as working through the lessons. Until then they stay in progress.
Moving from one state to the next is a swap, and Alva Courses does it in that order: the new tag is added first, the old one removed straight after. That way a student is never left holding no tag at all, which would drop them out of all three segments at once. The trade is that they can briefly carry two — and if the removal does not go through, they keep both until their next piece of progress pushes the swap again and clears it.
Turn on progress tags
1. Open the course settings
In the Shopify admin, open Alva Courses, click Courses, and open the course you want to tag. Select the Settings tab and scroll to Progress Tags.
2. Choose Enable progress tags
Progress Tags has two options: Enable progress tags and Disable progress tags. Every course starts on Disable progress tags, so choose Enable progress tags.
3. Set the tag name
Tag name is filled in for you the moment you enable progress tags. Alva Courses builds it from the course URL and puts the course’s ID number on the end — a course at /watercolour-101 with the ID 42 gets watercolour-101-42 — which is what stops two courses ever sharing a tag. Keep it or replace it with your own: lowercase letters a–z, numbers and hyphens only, up to 40 characters, no commas. Do not clear the field — an empty Tag name blocks the save with Enter a tag name before saving. Each course you enable needs a tag name no other enabled course is already using. Choose carefully: the tag name is fixed once it is set.
4. Save and copy the finished tags
Save the course. Tags added to customers then lists the three finished tags against the labels Not started, In progress and Completed. Copy them from there — a segment condition has to match the tag exactly.
Students who are already enrolled are not tagged
Turning progress tags on does not tag the students you already have. Tagging starts from that moment: the next student to enrol, complete a lesson or finish the course gets the right tag. Everyone else stays untagged until they do something, so a segment built the same afternoon can look empty.
That is the most common reason progress tags get reported as broken, and nothing is wrong — there is no new activity to tag yet. If you want your existing students tagged now, email courses@alvaapps.com and tell us which course: we run a one-off sync that reads every current enrolment and writes the matching tag. There is no button for it in the app.
The tag name is fixed once you set it
The tag name cannot be changed afterwards — not from the course settings, not from anywhere else, and not by turning progress tags off first. Renaming would strand the old tags on real customer records in Shopify with nothing left to clean them up, while your segments kept matching a tag Alva Courses no longer maintains. Get in touch if you need one changed.
Changing the course URL later does not change the tags. They are fixed when you set them up, so renaming a course or moving it to a new address leaves your segments working.
Things to know before you build a flow
Tags reflect progress, not access. A student whose access has expired, or whose access you have revoked, keeps whatever progress tag they had — including the completed tag. A segment on completed is a list of people who finished the course, not of people who can still open it.
A duplicated course starts clean. The copy has progress tags off and an empty tag name, even when the original had both set. Two courses writing the same three tags to the same customers would corrupt both segments, so give the copy its own tag name when you turn tags on for it.
Shopify allows around 250 tags per customer. Each course with progress tags turned on uses three of them — worth counting if you sell dozens of courses to the same people.
What students see
Nothing. Progress tags are written to the customer record in the Shopify admin, where only you and your staff see them. The course player is unchanged, and lessons, quizzes and certificates work exactly as before.
See also
Was this helpful?
Last updated 2026-08-25