Controlling who can see which products in your store is really important once you start selling products wholesale.
This guide will take you through the options for controlling product visibility within your store.
There are currently four main options for controlling product visibility across the store within the Wholesale Suite plugins (primarily speaking about WooCommerce Wholesale Prices Premium and WooCommerce Wholesale Order Form):
The 「Only Show Wholesale Products To Wholesale Users」 global setting
The 「Restrict To Wholesale Roles」 visibility options on products themselves
Making a variation 「Wholesale Only」 on individual variations
The Permissions & Filters settings on the order form
The first two are related to WooCommerce Wholesale Prices Premium but affect all parts of your store (including the related products and the WooCommerce Wholesale Order Form page) and the last applies only to the WooCommerce Wholesale Order Form page.
1. Only Show Wholesale Products To Wholesale Users
This is a global setting which you can find under the Wholesale Prices settings page:
Login to WordPress
Navigate to WooCommerce->Settings
Click on the Wholesale Prices tab
Check the 「Only Show Wholesale Products To Wholesale Users」 option and save
Once this option is saved your store will check the user』s role and if they have a valid wholesale role it will determine if that product should be visible to that user by checking if there has been a wholesale price defined for that product.
This also respects the global % discount and also the product category % discount options (see our advanced wholesale pricing options guide for more info).
2. Restrict To Wholesale Roles
You can also restrict individual product visibility to certain roles only. This is really handy if you have multiple wholesale role tiers and need to restrict the visibility of particular products that get unlocked per role.
You will find this option on the Publish box of your individual products:
3. Restrict Variations To Wholesale Only
Have a Variable type product where you just need to make one variation 「wholesale only」?
You can achieve this by making the individual variation a 「Wholesale Exclusive Variation」. It』s as simple as checking a box next to the wholesale roles that should have permission to view this variation.
4. Permissions & Filters Settings in WooCommerce Wholesale Order Form
Our optimized WooCommerce order form plugin gives you the ability to further restrict what wholesale customers see on that page.
First off you can actually restrict access to this page via the user』s role. If they don』t have a role that has permission they will see an access denied screen instead.
Numerous filters can also be set under the Filters screen in the settings. These include being able to restrict the order form to one particular category and also being able to exclude individual products from the list.
Having Product Visibility Problems?
Sometimes if you have used a product importer or bulk management tool you may need to re-initialize the product visibility meta which is used as an indicator for the system to identify which products to show to which users.
See here for instructions: How to re-initialize product visibility meta