Automatically change user roles after purchasing a product in WooCommerce

Do you want to automatically change your customers’ user roles after they purchase a product in WooCommerce? In this article, I’ll show you how to automatically change the user’s roles after making a purchase depending on which WooCommerce product(s) they’ve bought.

We’ll also look at how to set an expiration date for the new role and how to send a reminder email before the role expires.

Why change user roles after purchase?

One of the main reasons that you might want to automatically change the user roles of customers after they check out is if you’re running a membership site or store.

In this case, users would join your site by purchasing a membership plan, which is simply a WooCommerce product. For example. a user purchases your ‘Gold’ membership plan so would be allocated the ‘Gold Member’ user role after checkout.

Having the ‘Gold Member’ user role would then entitle them to certain benefits on your site, like being able to access restricted content or getting a discount on certain products.

Even better, you could create a variable ‘Membership’ product with variations for Gold, Silver, Bronze etc. You can assign a different role depending on which variation the user purchases.

To allow you to automatically update user roles after checkout, you’ll need Members Only, which is a WooCommerce membership plugin:

For more information about WooCommerce user roles, please see this article.

Change user roles after purchase in WooCommerce

We’ll look at two methods for changing the user’s role after they purchase a product.

Method #1: A single, simple product

The simplest way is to assign a new role for a single product. When the user purchases the specific product, Members Only will automatically assign the new role to that user.

To update a single product:

• Edit the product
• Click the ‘Members Only’ tab
• Enter the user roles that will be assigned to the customer after they purchase the product

Now, whenever a customer purchases that product, they will be assigned the additional role(s) you’ve specified.

Method #2: Using membership plans

Membership plans are sets of rules that determine which users can see which content on your site. So, for example, you might have a membership plan that only allows users with the ‘Gold member’ role to view certain product categories and blog content; users with the ‘Silver member’ role can view different categories and content; and so on.

Membership plans have the option to specify a product which needs to be purchased in order to access the plan’s privileges. So the user might need to purchase the ‘Gold Membership’ product in order to gain the ‘Gold member’ role.

To create a membership plan in WooCommerce that requires a specific product to be purchased:

• Go to Members Only > Plans and click ‘Add New Plan’
• Enter details in the ‘Restriction Settings’ and ‘Content Settings’ sections that determine what content will be restricted in the plan. For example, you could choose to restrict content from certain product categories, certain post types, and/or certain post categories
• Enable the ‘Requires Purchase’ setting
• Select which product the user needs to purchase to access the membership plan in the ‘Product(s)’ field. Note that this could be a variation – so you could create a single variable product with variations for ‘Gold’, ‘Silver’ and ‘Bronze’ memberships
• Enter the role(s) that the user will be assigned after purchase in the ‘Assign User Roles’ field

Let’s take a look at some options when the membership period has expired.

Removing the user role after specified time period

Both the methods above, allow you to remove the user role when the membership period comes to an end.

If you’re using Method 1 on a single product, you can set an expiry date after a set period of time. In the ‘Expires after’ field, enter a value like 6 months, 1 year, etc. The date of purchase will be recorded and the user role will be removed when the expiry period has been exceeded.

For Method 2, there is more flexibility. You can specify the length of the membership in different formats and even assign role(s) when the membership expires.

• Optionally, enter the role(s) that the user will be assigned if their membership lapses
• Choose an option in ‘Membership Length’. You can choose from:
  • No expiry: select this option if there’s no end date on the membership plan
  • Specific length: choose this if the membership will run for a set period of time, e.g. 1 year
  • Fixed date: choose this if the membership will end on a specific date
• Depending on what option you select above, you’ll be able to set either a fixed period or a specific date when the membership will end

Just enter the period that the roles should be assigned to the user. After that period, the roles will be removed and the user can be invited to extend their membership.

Sending a reminder when the user role is due to expire

You might want to send the user a courtesy email to remind them that their membership is due to expire. You can do this by entering a period in the ‘Send reminder’ field. This will then automatically trigger a reminder email at the specified period before the role expires.

Automatically assign roles to new customers in WooCommerce

The method described above works perfectly for both existing customers and new customers.

If you want to ensure that customers are registered and logged in before they check out, you’ll need to disable the ‘Guest checkout’ option in WooCommerce.

Go to WooCommerce > Accounts & Privacy and deselect the ‘Allow customers to place orders without an account’ checkbox.

How to automatically create an account for new WooCommerce customers

However, you can also automatically register an account for new customers in WooCommerce. This will ensure that user roles will get allocated to all customers, even if they haven’t previously created an account.

To automatically create an account for WooCommerce customers when they make a purchase:

• Go to WooCommerce > Accounts & Privacy
• Enable the ‘During checkout’ option. This ensures that an account is created automatically for any new customers
• Enable the ‘Send password setup link’ option so that the user is not forced to create a password on the checkout page itself. Instead, they’ll receive an email with a link to create the password. This means users aren’t forced to think of a password on the spot and reduces any friction at the checkout
• Also, enable the ‘User email address as account login’ so that the user doesn’t have to think of a user name on the spot

Now, new users will have their account automatically created when they make a purchase – so you can now assign them with a new user role.

WooCommerce user roles

WooCommerce Members Only is a fully-fledged user roles plugin. Not only does it allow you to automatically assign roles after purchase, it is a user role manager.

With Members Only, you can create, edit and delete user roles. You can also assign or remove capabilities from roles.

How to create and edit user roles in WooCommerce Members Only

To create a new user role in WooCommerce:

• Go to Members Only > User Roles
• To create a new role, enter the name of your new role at the base of the ‘Roles’ field and click ‘Add role’

• If you’d like to edit the role name, just click ‘Edit’ and update the role name in the text field
• Finally, to delete a role, just click ‘Delete’. Note that it’s not possible to delete roles that are created by WordPress or WooCommerce, only roles created manually

You can then check current user roles using a number of methods:

• Using the wp_get_current_user() function to get the WP_User object and accessing the roles property.
• Utilizing the current_user_can() function to check if the current user has a specific capability.
• Using the user_can() function to check if a specific user has a certain capability.
• Through the get_userdata() function and then accessing the roles property.
• Employing third-party plugins that provide role management features.

Tell the user their role has changed

A great way to ensure your customer knows that their role has been updated is to use the WooCommerce Thank You Pages plugin to add some custom content to your Thank You page.

There’s a tutorial on creating a WooCommerce custom Thank You page here.

How to set product price by user role in WooCommerce

Once you’ve assigned a user role after purchase, you might want to provide some benefits to customers with that user role.

A typical benefit would be to get a discounted price. You can see how to set prices by user role in WooCommerce here.

You can also find out how to hide products by user roles in WooCommerce.

You should also read this article for more information on WooCommerce user approvals.

Recap

That’s a pretty short and sweet look at how to automatically change user roles in WooCommerce after purchasing a product. You just need the WooCommerce Members Only plugin.