When the trigger fires
Alva Courses checks deadlines every hour and fires Course access expiring soon when a student's access is 14, 7, 3 and 1 days from ending, once at each point. Days until expiry says which point was reached, so a condition on it picks the reminder you want.
Only the nearest point fires. A student who enrols with 5 days of access gets a single 7-day event, never 14 and 7 at once. If you move a student's deadline, the countdown starts again from the new date.
Free courses, which never expire, membership-tag access and revoked access are skipped. The countdown runs to the deadline itself, before any grace period. The triggers reference lists the fields, including Access expires at.
Build the reminder
1. Create a workflow
In your Shopify admin, open Apps → Flow and click Create workflow. Then click Select a trigger.
2. Choose Course access expiring soon
Choose Alva Courses, then Course access expiring soon. Its customer is the student whose access is ending.
3. Add a condition for 7 days
Add a condition that Days until expiry is equal to 7. A week leaves time to finish the last lessons or renew. Without the condition, the workflow runs at 14, 7, 3 and 1 days and sends four emails.
4. Add the reminder email
On the condition's Then branch, add Send marketing email and design it in Shopify Messaging. Use the subject Your course access ends soon and tell the student how to finish or renew, with a button to your store's courses page.
5. Name it and turn it on
Name the workflow Remind students before their course access expires and click Turn on workflow. Alva Courses only sends this trigger while a turned-on workflow uses it, so turn it on before you test.
6. Test it with a 6-day deadline
In Alva Courses, open Members, then a test student who is enrolled in a paid course and subscribed to email marketing. Click Edit under their access deadline, choose Limited and set a date 6 days from today. Within the hour, the 7-day event fires and the email goes out.
7. Check the run
On the Shopify Flow settings page in Alva Courses, Flow activity → Triggers sent lists the event. In Flow, the workflow's recent runs show whether the condition passed and the email was sent.
Who receives the reminder
Send marketing email reaches only students subscribed to email marketing; Shopify skips the rest. Shopify Flow itself has no transactional email for customers: its Send internal email action can't be addressed to the workflow's customer, so Shopify keeps it for staff.
The email is built in Shopify Messaging from the customer's record, so it can't print workflow values such as Course title or Access expires at. For a course-specific message, add a condition that Course ID is equal to the course's Flow ID, such as 42, and build one workflow per course.
To reach every student instead, use Alva Courses' Resend course access email action with the trigger's Course ID as its course. It resends your enrolment email, link included, to any enrolled student with an email address, but says nothing about the deadline.
Extend access automatically
To give students more time instead of a warning, pair the trigger with Alva Courses' Extend or set course access action. Fill in exactly one of its options: Extend access by this many days adds to the current deadline, so 14 gives two more weeks. The actions reference covers every option.
For example, extend students who are halfway through. In a second workflow on the same trigger, add a condition that Days until expiry is equal to 1, then Get course progress with the trigger's Course ID variable as its course. Add a condition that percentComplete is greater than or equal to 50 and completed is false, and on Then, extend by 14 days.
Each extension restarts the countdown, so that student reaches the 1-day point again two weeks later. To extend only once, limit the workflow to one course, add Add customer tags with access-extended-42 after extending, and skip customers who already have that tag.
Extending is refused for free courses and membership-tag access, which never expire, and for revoked access. The run fails with the reason and nothing changes.
Frequently asked questions
At 14, 7, 3 and 1 days before a student's access deadline, once at each point. Alva Courses checks every hour and sends only the nearest point reached, so a student enrolled with 5 days left gets the 7-day event only.
The countdown starts again from the new deadline. The student gets fresh 14, 7, 3 and 1-day events for the new date, so your 7-day reminder goes out again before it.
Send marketing email only reaches customers subscribed to email marketing. The trigger also skips free courses, membership-tag access and revoked access, and a student whose deadline was already less than 3 days away never reaches the 7-day point.
Only when expiry enforcement is on for your store. Deadlines are shown everywhere, but they start refusing access once enforcement is switched on, and your store's grace period adds extra days. Alva support sets both; email courses@alvaapps.com to check yours.
See also
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Last updated 2026-10-01