WooCommerce wine club: create an exclusive online shop

In this article, we’re going to look at how to create a WooCommerce wine club. Our club will have different membership levels:

• Some products will be available to all users
• Some products will be exclusive to our members

Although this article focuses on wine, you can use it to create any type of exclusive online shop.

Building our WooCommerce wine club

Our wine store is a specific type of WooCommerce membership site. Part of the store is open to any user; but we’ve also got some products that we want to keep just for our members.

We’ll look at how to:

• Set up membership levels
• Create WooCommerce categories that can only be accessed by members

You can view the demo wine shop here.

What plugins are we using?

Apart from WooCommerce, we’ll be using the Members Only plugin.

1. Creating our membership levels

We’ll keep this simple and only create one membership level, called ‘Member’. To do this, we need to create a new WooCommerce role.

To create our membership role:

• Install and activate WooCommerce Members Only
• Go to WooCommerce > Settings > Members Only > User Roles
• Duplicate the ‘Customer’ role by selecting ‘Customer’ in the ‘User roles’ field
• Enter the name of your new role – in this case, ‘Member’
• Click ‘Duplicate role’

We’ve now created our ‘Member’ user role.

2. Define our exclusive members only content

In our WooCommerce wine club, only some of our wine will be available exclusively to members. We can define which products will be exclusive by using WooCommerce categories.

Firstly, to set up the exclusive content:

• Go to WooCommerce > Settings > Members Only
• Set the ‘Restriction Method’ to ‘User Role’
• Set the ‘Restricted Content’ to ‘Specified Categories’
• Enter the categories that are reserved for members in the ‘Restricted Categories’ field
• In the ‘Permitted User Roles’ setting, enter the user role(s) that can access the exclusive content

3. View the demo wine club

It should take about 10 minutes to set this up, from start to finish (assuming you’ve already got your products entered on to your site).

You can see the demo WooCommerce wine club here, using the Twenty Twenty theme. There are only seven products on the site: four are available for anyone; and three are exclusive to members.

If you’d like to log in as a member, just use the following credentials:

• Username: member
• Password: member

You can see that members have access to more products.

Extending your WooCommerce wine club

Would you like to offer your customers the ability to build their own mixed cases of wine? You can do that with the Product Add-Ons Ultimate plugin. There’s a complete tutorial here.

Alternatively, you might wish to offer discounts to customers. There’s a tutorial here on creating role-based discounts in WooCommerce.

And if you’d like to offer wholesale pricing through your WooCommerce wine club, take a look at this article.

WooCommerce wine club – a recap

It’s incredibly simple to set up a wine club in WooCommerce. All you need is the WooCommerce Members Only plugin: