How to Manage Wholesale Product Visibility With WooCommerce

Being able to sell to both retail and wholesale customers is a good way to make the most out of your online business. Having a separate website for managing wholesale product visibility can be tedious and time-consuming, however.

Fortunately, it’s not necessary to have an entirely separate website for your wholesale customers. With our Wholesale Suite plugin for WooCommerce, you can take advantage of highly customizable wholesale settings within your existing retail website.

In this article, we’ll take you through the steps you’ll need to manage wholesale product visibility in your WooCommerce store. We’ll also discuss why you might want to hide your wholesale pricing from your retail customers. Let’s jump right in!

What managing wholesale product visibility means and why it matters to your business

If we look at e-commerce globally, it is projected to continue to trend upward over the next few years. This is in addition to its already stable footing with internet users. In fact, 40 percent of worldwide internet users have also made purchases online.

This means it’s more important than ever to make sure your sales website is serving your customers. You might already have a well-established retail business but if you’re also serving wholesale customers it’s best to keep your wholesale pricing hidden from your regular customers.

Wholesale pricing is typically quite a bit different from your retail options, you’ll want to avoid causing any confusion for your customers. Hiding your wholesale products from retail customers keeps everyone on the right page and can help wholesale customers navigate quickly through your products.

How to manage wholesale product visibility (4 methods)

To leverage custom visibility for your customers in WooCommerce, you can use both our WooCommerce Wholesale Prices Premium and the WooCommerce Wholesale Order Form plugins. With these, there are four methods for managing wholesale visibility, let’s take a look.

1. Restrict access to wholesale items via global user settings

This is one of the easiest ways to create a blanket rule for wholesale product visibility. In your WordPress dashboard, navigate to WooCommerce > Settings > Wholesale Pricing:

Checking this option will hide any non-wholesale items from your wholesale users. This means you’ll have to make sure you’ve assigned the appropriate user roles to your customers.

2. Use wholesale roles to manage visibility per product

If your business model requires customization at the product level, you can use Wholesale Roles to fine-tune visibility for wholesale customers. First, you’ll need to navigate to WooCommerce > Wholesale Roles:

Once you’ve created all the roles you need, you can go to Products > All Products and specify which roles should have access to each product:

You can access these settings via the Quick Edit option in the product list. This makes it a quick way to make important product visibility changes. You can also access this setting underneath the Publish button once you open a product page.

3. Create variations for wholesale-only products

Within each product you create with WooCommerce, you can also create variations of that product. This might be the available patterns or colors of a product or the size.

If you want to create one that is only for wholesale customers, you can use the Wholesale Exclusive Variation setting that’s available within each variation:

You can access this by going to Products > All Products in your WordPress dashboard. Once you select the product you want to adjust you can find this setting under the Variations tab.

You’ll need to have variations already set up for the product in order for the tab to be visible. If you don’t, you can also set up your variations from this menu.

4. Configure user permissions for the WooCommerce Wholesale Order Form

Our WooCommerce Wholesale Order Form plugin can help you create a user-friendly order form for your wholesale customers:

To set custom permissions for your Wholesale Order Forms, you can go to WooCommerce > Settings > Wholesale Ordering > Permissions:

Here, you can enable order form access for the user roles you select. You can also use the Filters to further manage your wholesale product visibility:

By using Filters, you can hide certain products from the wholesale order form. With this approach, you can leave the form open to all of your wholesale customers but keep certain retail products off the list.

Additionally, you can use Filters with Permissions to create a completely customized experience for each of your Wholesale Roles.

Conclusion

Managing both wholesale and retail customers can sometimes mean you’re juggling resources. Fortunately, with WooCommerce Wholesale Order Forms and the Wholesale Suite plugin, managing wholesale product visibility won’t be a ‘dropped ball’.

In order to easily manage your product visibility, keep these four methods in mind, including:

1. Restrict access by using global user settings
2. Use wholesale roles to manage access per product
3. Create variations for wholesale-only products
4. Set user permissions for your WooCommerce Wholesale Order Form

Do you have more questions about how to manage wholesale product visibility with WooCommerce? Share your questions with us in the comments section below!