Setting up Restrictions on Products in WooCommerce: A Complete Guide

Want to restrict your WooCommerce products to members-only?

Doing this lets you offer a personalised shopping experience to members of your website. It also encourages regular customers to register as members on your site so they can gain access to the restricted WooCommerce products.

All kinds of business owners use WooCommerce product restrictions to curate private or personalised experiences for members. These include galleries, photographers, or schools.

For instance, if you sell prints or stock photos on your WooCommerce site, you can restrict some products to your “VIP” members only. Exclusive members might qualify for a better price compared to everybody else. As a result, it encourages more people to become VIP members. 

In this tutorial, we’ll show you how to apply restrictions on your WooCommerce products in a step-by-step guide and go over some potential use cases of implementing them.

Why set up WooCommerce product restrictions?

While WooCommerce certainly has a lot of applications, it’s pretty limited when it comes to restricting WooCommerce products on your online store. However, many WooCommerce plugins can help you extend your store’s functionality.

Our plugins, for instance, offer an intuitive way of setting up restrictions on your WooCommerce products.

Plugin Republic offers a wide range of powerful plugins that can help you customise or personalise the look and feel of your WooCommerce store based on your specific needs. This lets you offer an enhanced shopping experience to customers in your online store. 

The WooCommerce Members Only plugin makes it easy to set up product restrictions in WooCommerce. You can restrict user access to your products using passwords, by user role, or by logged-in status.

WooCommerce product restrictions use cases

Let’s take a look at a few use cases of these plugins and how they can help you create amazing WooCommerce stores:

• Private wholesale stores. You can create private wholesale stores inside of your regular WooCommerce store. This means that you can let wholesale buyers place bulk orders from your online store. You can assign the “wholesale customers” user role for wholesale customers while still selling products to regular customers. 
• Filterable and sortable product tables. You can create product tables on your WooCommerce site. This way, you can list WooCommerce products in product tables that are easy to navigate and can help improve product visibility on your shop page.
• Restaurant order forms. If you run an online restaurant website, you can let customers quickly order from your WooCommerce site through a restaurant order form. This makes it easier to buy from you and helps you manage restaurant orders much more efficiently.
• Membership sites. It’s also possible to create WooCommerce membership sites and manage them using our plugins. It works great for school departments, clubs, or affiliate marketers looking to offer high-quality content in return for a subscription fee that’s renewed monthly or annually.

How to set up restrictions on your WooCommerce products 

Here, we’ll take a look at how you can set up restrictions on your WooCommerce products easily. For this tutorial, we’ll need the WooCommerce Members Only plugin along with a WooCommerce site with some products added to it. 

Downloading and Installing Plugin Republic plugins

Start by getting the WooCommerce Members Only plugin. Once you purchase the plugin, you will receive an email containing the license key for your plugin and the download link.

Click on the link to download the plugin on your device. Now, you can upload the plugin to your WooCommerce site to install it. 

Here’s what you need to do:

Navigate to Plugins → Add New → Upload Plugin and select the woocommerce-members-only.zip file and click the upload button. 

Once the plugin is successfully uploaded to your site, click the Activate button to enable the WooCommerce Members Only plugin on your site. Now, you can start using it to set up WooCommerce product restrictions.

Customising who can access your content

The WooCommerce Members Only plugin lets you choose between different restriction methods to determine who can access your content. Navigate to WooCommerce → Settings → Members Only and select the Restriction Method using the drop-down menu. 

Let’s go over each of the three options in the Restriction Method:

Logged in users only

This option allows you to only let people who are logged into the site access the hidden content. This way, you can offer logged-in users access to exclusive WooCommerce products while hiding them from all other users on your WooCommerce site. Select the User Role option from the drop-down menu next to Restriction Method and click on the Save changes button to continue.

This way, only logged-in users can access the “add to cart” button on your ecommerce store.

Password Protected

You can also password protect your WooCommerce products by creating one or two passwords and handing them out to registered users. Users who do not enter a password will be locked out of the hidden content until they enter the correct password. You have the option to set one global password or create multiple passwords, either unique to each individual or one for each group.

Start by selecting the Password option from the drop-down menu and a new section called Password Settings will appear dynamically on your screen. Using the Passwords text field you can enter multiple passwords, according to what you need. In addition to this, you can also create a password form automatically.

After selecting the Password restriction method and setting the passwords, click on the Save changes button. You’ll see a notification to automatically create a page. Here, you’ll need to click on Yes, please create a page for the password form. This will automatically create a page on the front-end of your site and embed the password form on the page. As a result, this not only saves you time but also helps you quickly restrict content on your WooCommerce site using passwords. 

You can also tick the checkbox next to Hide in Archives and Hide Price. This will restrict the user from viewing any part of your content until they log in. Using the Add To Cart Text text field, you can also display text instead of the Add to Cart buttons.

Here’s how users who are not logged in will see products on your WooCommerce store:

User role

The WooCommerce Members Only plugin also allows you to let users access your content based on their user role. For instance, you can set only users with the Editor role to access your hidden store.

Select the User Role option from the Restriction Method and click the Save changes button. This will hide content from your WooCommerce site for all user roles except the Administrator and Editor user roles. It’s a simple way to restrict content based on user roles.

Hiding specific content in WooCommerce

You can also choose to hide specific content on your WooCommerce site. This way, you can still let users access other content, just not the exclusive or hidden content.

You can access the Restricted Content setting by navigating to WooCommerce → Settings → Members Only from the WordPress admin panel. 

The All Product Pages option lets you restrict content and WooCommerce products by hiding all product pages from your online store. The All WooCommerce Pages option lets you hide all your WooCommerce pages. You can also hide content on your entire site by selecting the Entire Site option from the drop-down menu. The plugin also lets you hide specific product categories from your WooCommerce store. 

Once you’re done selecting the Restricted Content setting, click on the Save changes button to continue. 

Restricting individual WooCommerce products

You can also restrict individual WooCommerce products on your ecommerce store using the WooCommerce Members-only plugin.

Simply navigate to the product’s edit page and click on the Members Only tab under the Product data meta box. Here, you can select from the three options, including By User Role. By User, and By Password. Once you’ve selected the Restriction method, click on the Update button to save changes on the front-end. This will restrict all unauthorised users’ access to this specific product. 

Only permitted user roles will be able to access the product and be able to add it to their shopping cart. It will look something like this:

Restricting WooCommerce products by category

Using the Restricted Content setting mentioned previously, you can hide specific WooCommerce categories using the WooCommerce Members Only plugin. All you need to do is select the Specific Categories option using the drop-down menu next to Restricted Content.

You can specify which categories you want to restrict access to and hide the product price or prevent unauthorised users from buying products from those categories. Once you’re done, click the Save changes button to continue.

Restricted users will not be able to access the specific WooCommerce categories on your online store. Once they successfully enter the password, they can view prices and add products to their shopping cart from the restricted WooCommerce category. 

Using advanced restrictions in WooCommerce

The WooCommerce Members Only plugin also offers advanced restriction options for your WooCommerce store. You can restrict (or allow) payment gateways based on the user role of the customer. This way, you can offer customised payment methods or exclusive payment methods only for customers on your WooCommerce store.

The WooCommerce Members Only plugin also allows you to restrict (or allow) shipping methods by user role. In addition to this, you can also hide widgets and menus from users, redirect users to a different URL depending on the password, and hide prices for restricted products. All of this is possible without having to code or use shortcodes.

Further customising your WooCommerce products

So, what else can you do to customise your online store?

There are many ways you can customise and offer a unique shopping experience. Let’s take a look at a few examples:

• You can offer premium add-ons. Set up product personalisation on your WooCommerce store by offering premium product add-ons for products. This way, you not only offer a personalised shopping experience but also increase the average order value. 
• You can display your WooCommerce products better. You can display your WooCommerce products better in customisable and easy-to-navigate product tables. 
• Offer dynamic pricing rules and discounts. You can also offer dynamic pricing rules and discounts on your online store. For instance, you can offer bulk discounts or charge fees on all products in your online store. Additionally, you can also set up user role-based pricing for products in your store. For example, you can charge Subscribers $20 for a t-shirt while VIP Customers pay only $17 for the same product. 

Let’s take a look at some of the robust plugins that can help you customise your WooCommerce store even better:

WooCommerce Product Add-Ons Ultimate

The WooCommerce Product Add-Ons Ultimate plugin lets you offer the ultimate suite of add-ons and extra options for your WooCommerce products. This way, you can personalise products with extra options to add more value to your offering. It lets you pick from 10+ add-on field types including checkboxes, dropdowns, text fields, radio buttons, file upload, and many more. You can insert add-on fields on your product pages and let shoppers customise their product before adding it to their shopping cart and proceeding to the checkout page.

Additionally, the WooCommerce Product Add-Ons Ultimate plugin offers advanced features like conditional logic. This gives you more control over how your WooCommerce products are displayed on your online store. 

WooCommerce Product Table Ultimate

The WooCommerce Product Table Ultimate plugin lets you create sortable, filterable product lists quickly and easily. This is perfect for displaying your products in an attractive, table-style layout. As a result, shoppers will have an easier time finding exactly the product they need and help them quickly add it to their cart without being redirected to the single product page.

This is a great way to boost sales and helps make your WooCommerce store user-friendly. The WooCommerce Product Table Ultimate plugin is also perfect for listing variable products.

WooCommerce Fees and Discounts

WooCommerce Fees and Discounts is a WordPress plugin designed to help you customise price adjustments on your online store. It lets you set bulk and dynamic pricing rules and set user role pricing for your WooCommerce products. This is a great way to offer tier-based pricing to customers.

The WooCommerce Fees and Discounts plugin offers a simple way to apply bulk discounts or fees, either fixed or percentage, to all products on your WooCommerce store. You can create dynamic pricing rules such as a “Buy One Get One Free” offer or offer a gift with the order.

In addition to this, you can also offer discounts based on the total value in the shopper’s cart. This is a great way to encourage customers to add more products to their cart and spend more than they originally planned. As a result, this helps boost sales and increase the revenue your store generates. The WooCommerce Fees and Discounts plugin also let you apply fees or discounts based on the payment gateway the shopper decides to use. 

Conclusion

Setting up restrictions on products in WooCommerce can be challenging, especially if you don’t have the right tools on hand. However, with the help of the WooCommerce Members Only plugin, you have the freedom to customise your WooCommerce store to fit your business needs best. 

You can set different restriction rules depending on your specific needs. It lets you restrict access to products by logged-in status, user role, and passwords.

Ready to start restricting your WooCommerce products? Get WooCommerce Members Only today!