Product Visibility for Customers

If you are a growing business, you may want to expand into providing your services to wholesale customers. Alternatively, you may provide customized products that you want to sell to specific groups of customers.

In both of these cases, you may also be concerned that these products should be restricted so that they can't be found through search engines of product feeds.

These requirements can now be simply addressed by adding Customer Visibility tags to your products.

The instructions for setting up Customer Visibility are outlined below, but you can also view a short video tutorial on how to do this on YouTube.

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Setting up Customer Visibility for Products

The first thing that you need check is that you have enabled Advanced product options from the Your Settings menu link. Clik on the link, then scroll down to the Advanced Configuration section and make sure the option is enabled. Make sure you save your settings if this needs to be updated.

You should also make sure that you have added some tags to your customers in order to make this function work.

Group your Customers by Tag

In the customer accounts section, add the required tag to each of the customers that will belong to that group. For example, if you want to set up a vip group, then add the tag word vip to each of the customer in the group.

As a shortcut, from your list of customers, you can select one or more of them and then using the group Add tags option, which will let you add one or more tags to a group of customers at the same time.

Restrict Product Visibility

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  Restrict Product Visibility

Having created and added the vip tag to the group of customers, you can now add that tag to the product's Customer Visibility section.

In the side-bar of the product page, you'll find a Customer Visibility section. Click on the input field, and you'll see a drop-down of all the available customer tags that you can add to this product. Click on vip and it will appear in the input field. You can add as many customer tags as you want, if you need to restrict the visibility of this product to a number of different customer groups.

Test the Product's Visibility

Once you have tagged your products, you'll see that if your customer has not logged on, then the product cannot be seen on your store. You can't access it directly and it won't appear in any collection. Also, it won't appear in any search result.

Finally, the product won't be submitted to search engines through the site map and it won't be included in any product data-feeds that you configure.

Once a product has been tagged with a customer tag, then only customers who have that tag can see or purchase the product.