Alva Courses

What Alva Courses is

Alva Courses is a Shopify app for building, selling and delivering online courses inside an existing Shopify store. The home page puts it this way: "Course management lives in the Shopify admin; students learn in a branded storefront course player and access every enrolment from their Shopify customer account. No second platform, no second login." It is made by Alva Apps Ltd of London, founded by Tom Rushmore, and the changelog lists v2.7.0, shipped in September 2026.

It is built for merchants who teach. The use cases the site lists include coaches and consultants, fitness instructors, yoga teachers, language tutors, cooking instructors, photographers, music teachers and business trainers. Alva Courses has a 5.0-star rating on the Shopify App Store from 13 reviews.

How a sale becomes an enrollment

Each course is bound to a Shopify product, so the course is sold through the store's normal checkout. The site says course access "fires the moment an order is paid," with no manual fulfillment: the trigger is the paid order, and enrollment is automatic. The student then gets an enrollment email, watches lessons in the storefront course player, and finds every course under My Courses in their customer account. The pricing section sums up the model as "Flat monthly. No per-sale cuts."

The site's setup promise is "Launch your course this afternoon": install from the Shopify App Store, build a course, link it to a product, and place a test order to watch the enrollment go through.

Building lessons

Courses are organized into sections and lessons with a drag-and-drop builder and a WYSIWYG lesson editor. The FAQ lists what a lesson can hold: "rich text with tables and formatting, video (Alva-hosted, YouTube, Vimeo, VdoCipher or Loom), images, PDFs, audio, ePub, MS Office documents, quizzes, Zoom links and buttons." The lesson title can be centered, and a creator can "require completion before the next lesson for sequential courses," which turns a course into a strict step-by-step path.

The student side is a native storefront player with a sidebar lesson list, a progress bar and completion ticks. Quizzes and assessments are included on both plans.

Drip, scheduling and access

Release can be paced in several ways. The features section says a creator can "Drip lessons or whole sections a set number of days after enrolment, schedule a lesson to publish on a date, or keep content as a draft until you are ready," with visibility controls per section and per lesson. The cooking-class guide on the company blog gives a worked example: a six-week sourdough course that releases one module each week. Both plans also include limited-time access for courses that should expire.

Certificates

Alva Courses "automatically awards a custom-designed completion certificate when a student finishes every lesson and emails it to them." The template is fully editable. These are completion certificates issued by the store, not credentials from any outside body.

Discussions and branded email

Each lesson has its own comment thread. The site describes "a native per-lesson comment system with moderation tools," where students ask questions at the point they are stuck and the creator gets an email notification the moment a comment lands. Team members can moderate.

Emails are branded too. A creator can customize the from-name, subject, title, message, footer and login hint on enrollment emails, preview them in dark mode, and send them from their own verified domain. Certificate emails have their own settings.

Members and progress

Every course has a Members Overview with "total members, active enrolments, completions, completion rate and per-student progress bars with enrolment dates." A global Members view spans all courses, and members can be added by hand, bulk imported from CSV, exported to CSV, and searched or filtered. That export means student lists are not locked inside the app.

Video hosting and storage

Video is the one real difference between the plans. On Unlimited, uploaded videos use Shopify's own file hosting, which the FAQ says has "a 1 GB / 10-minute limit per video," though videos can also be embedded from YouTube, Vimeo, VdoCipher or Loom on either plan. Unlimited Pro adds "Alva Video Hosting: 50 GB of dedicated storage with no per-video size or length limits, bypassing Shopify's native file caps," and "10 GB of Alva File Storage for course files up to 500 MB each." Files in Alva File Storage are served behind secure, expiring links. The blog's example is a 40-minute technique video that uploads as a single clip on Pro.

Plans and pricing

There are two plans, each with a 14-day free trial and no free plan:

• Unlimited: $9.99 a month. Unlimited courses, members, lessons and comments, progress tracking and analytics, custom completion certificates, quizzes and assessments, drip scheduling and limited-time access, discussions, branded email and a custom domain. Video uses Shopify hosting at 1 GB and 10 minutes per video.
• Unlimited Pro: $14.99 a month. Everything in Unlimited, plus 50 GB of Alva Video Hosting with no per-video limits and 10 GB of Alva File Storage.

The price is flat per month rather than per student or per sale, and the plan is managed from the Shopify admin. Shopify's own fees for the store and its payments are separate.

Support

Support is by email, and the site states replies in under 4 hours, Monday to Friday, in English. There is a help center, an FAQ, a changelog, a glossary and a blog with guides such as selling cooking classes on Shopify. Reviews on the site praise the support; one ends "Setup was easy and everything works exactly as it should."

Who it suits

Alva Courses fits a merchant who already sells on Shopify and wants to add courses without running a second platform: a cooking school selling classes next to its products, a yoga or fitness brand adding programs, a photographer or musician selling lessons. Students buy through the same checkout and learn in the same customer account, and the creator manages it all in the Shopify admin. The low flat price and the per-lesson discussions make it practical for small creators.

It suits less well anyone without a Shopify store, since the app runs only inside Shopify. Creators with long video lessons should budget for the Pro plan.