Yes, a private online shop can be created in WooCommerce to restrict the purchase of products only to customers meeting a set of criteria. This might be useful to B2B scenarios where products are only sold to distributors, wholesalers or other groups of customers. Or, it could be useful to organisations such as clubs and societies who need to restrict their products to members only.
Realnet has successfully implemented ‘private online shops’ for clients by using a plugin that allows you to either allocate a universal password to allow access, or to allow access to customer accounts with specified permissions. The latter option has a lot of additional benefits, as it allows you to take advantage of customer-specific variables to display different product ranges or pricing structures.
With a private online shop, all of the standard WooCommerce pages are still available, but access to them is behind a login.
Other web pages can be shown or hidden based on the ‘logged in’ status of the user. These hidden pages might be ‘how to’ guides, membership benefit information, certifications, compliance documentation and other resources.
If you want to find out more about how Realnet could help you with WooCommerce, get in touch!