WooCommerce powers over 26% of global eCommerce websites and is an excellent and convenient way to create your online shop without writing a single line of code.

But besides its convenience – another factor that makes WooCommerce a popular choice is its flexibility. While the core WooCommerce installation helps you create a basic online store with ease – specific paid WooCommerce plugins make it easy to create a customized and ideal business model of your choice.

For instance, several businesses prefer a private WooCommerce store model to grant access or sell products and services to specific customers and hide from others. This is where a private store for WooCommerce plugins comes into the picture.

A great example is Oriflame – a direct sales leading beauty company that sells products for everyone and reserves some for specific VIP members on their website. They offer benefits like exclusive discounts, access to a complete range of products, and fast delivery to these VIP members.

There can be multiple other reasons behind creating a private WooCommerce store. In this article, we’ll briefly touch on those reasons and share some of the best WooCommerce private store plugins you can use for your WooCommerce store. Let’s go!

 

How do private WooCommerce store plugins help, and who can benefit from them?

WooCommerce doesn’t support hiding store functionality by default – which is why private WooCommerce store plugins are highly in demand for businesses that wish to take control over their store’s and product’s visibility.

Hiding specific store sections and restricting visibility can help you achieve multiple business needs. It can also make your brand appear exclusive and more luxurious.

Here are some common business scenarios where private WooCommerce store plugins prove beneficial.

  • You sell products to retail customers and want to create a private area for wholesale members – since the price varies depending on the buyers.
  • You own a B2B business and wish to protect your product catalog from the eyes of those who can’t purchase your products to maintain privacy.
  • You sell adult and sensitive products like tobacco, alcohol, and chemical substances – which can be harmful to underage audiences.
  • You want to reserve premium goods and services to loyal or VIP members and restrict them from one-time buyers.
  • You have different WooCommerce membership levels on your store and want to sell unique and exclusive products to each of these levels. For instance, restricting course chapters or video downloads to the subscribers and permitting access to the paid members.

If your store falls under any of these above-mentioned or other scenarios – WooCommerce private store plugins help your store. Let’s look at the best plugins you can use to hide products or pages on your WooCommerce store.

YITH WooCommerce Memberships

This private store plugin is one of the most flexible and robust WooCommerce plugins to create a members-only WooCommerce store and restrict user access.

If you want to sell premium and exclusive online courses, lessons, videos, or consultancies and make them accessible only to paid users – Yith’s WooCommerce memberships plugin is an ideal choice. It allows you to enhance your earnings by creating tailored content or products and selling them to premium members.

You can create unlimited plans (like Silver, Bronze, and Gold) and set permission rules for users depending on the plan they join.

For example, while one plan can let your users view all the blog posts, another plan only allows them to view 20% of the blog content – prompting them to either log in or subscribe to a higher membership plan to view the entire content.

Thus, it’s a perfect and intuitive plugin to hide pages from non-members and provide access to members of specific membership plans.

Top feature: Building a credit system that allows users to download items or digital resources like an eBook – is one of the top features of this plugin. For instance, from the three different membership levels, by joining membership level 2 – your user gets X credits, which they can use to download an eBook or a stock image.

Pricing: $149.99/year.

WooCommerce Private Store

This plugin is ideal for private membership sites or wholesale stores – which allows you to hide your WooCommerce store entirely from the public and unlock it for logged-in users or with a secret password.

It comes with flexible and customizable login rules – allowing you to fine-tune the user access per your choice. Besides the store pages – you can also hide other content like categories, carts, products, sidebars, and navigation menus.

Top feature: One of the best features of this plugin is the zero visibility on the search engines – hiding your store from the public-facing stores and ensuring the utmost privacy.

Pricing: The Starter plan starts at $79.

Private Store for WooCommerce

This is a simple plugin that hides your store’s content from guest users and prompts them to either log in or register to your store to view private pages, products, tags, and categories. Users can log in through the custom WooCommerce registration forms or the default login.

It also disables the search engine bots to crawl your store’s private pages and products – ensuring they stay hidden from guest users. Moreover, you can also choose to send notifications to your users about the changes in their account capabilities.

While this plugin isn’t as flexible or feature-rich as its competitors – it provides a quick and easy way to create a private WooCommerce store. All it requires is choosing the pages you wish to hide and customizing the registration forms. Then, you can either apply these settings to specific products and categories or across your entire store.

Top feature: It offers greater control over the registration process – allowing you to manually approve the user registrations or even disable login for specific users altogether (like users from specific countries).

Pricing: $49.00 (billed annually)

WooCommerce Memberships

This plugin is the most sophisticated plugin to create a private WooCommerce store area accessible to specific users only. It’s a great option for advanced stores that wish to create an entire site-wide membership system with multiple levels.

It lets you easily associate products with your membership plans for maximum flexibility. For instance, you can assign zero or multiple products to different membership plans to tie them together – encouraging customers to purchase the plan to use the products.

It also allows you to grant access or product purchases to a specific membership plan – like buying an online subscription course and getting access to exclusive live sessions and downloadable eBooks for free.

While these are some primary features of the plugin, it also comes with several other features like providing user access manually, offering shipping and special discounts to members, and interacting with members via email notes.

Top feature: Lets you strategically grant content access by dripping the content – allowing you to schedule when the users can access the content based on the membership level. For instance – requiring users to be members for a week before they can access specific pages.

Pricing: $199.00 (billed annually)

Hide Prices & Private Store for WooCommerce

This feature-packed and easy-to-use plugin is ideal for wholesale, B2B, or private membership stores. It allows you to hide prices, products, content, and categories and enable quote requests to offer a personalized customer experience.

This plugin is unique because, besides hiding pages and products, you can hide the prices by categories, products, user roles, and even country (IP-based). Moreover, you can also use the plugin’s content shortcode to display content to specific users and hide it from non-members.

Thus, it’s a perfect plugin if you want to hide the add to cart button and product prices from guest users until they log in to your store.

Top feature: This plugin lets you add a quote request system – allowing guest and logged-in users to quote the request for the product’s prices instead of viewing the price publicly. You can receive quotes from users via email and disable/enable the quote form fields.

Pricing: $49.00 (billed annually)

Private Store for WooCommerce B2B & Wholesale by B2BKing

As the name suggests, this private store plugin is a perfect solution for wholesale and B2B stores and offers over 137+ features and functionalities.

You can either hide your entire store, hide the prices for guests, or replace the prices with messages like – “Login to view prices” or “Request a quote.”

It also allows you to offer different discounts, set up different pricing models, product visibility, and free shipping requirements for different users based on membership plans or groups. Other features include setting complex tax rules and making personalized offers to different users based on their memberships.

Top feature: Besides allowing you to hide prices, add to cart button, and prevent checkout for guests – this plugin also takes care of complex details, such as tiered pricing structures, VAT handling, tax exemptions, and multiple buyers per account.

Pricing: Free

WooCommerce Private Store Plugin: Shop for Registered Users Only

This plugin encourages users to register on your store and get complete control over who can access your store and its content. Moreover, you get the option to either make your entire store private or hide specific pages, categories, and products.

While other plugins hide your store from the search engines – this plugin gives you a choice and flexibility to either present or hide your store or private pages from the search engine crawlers. You also get the option to approve registration requests either manually or automatically.

Other features include video embedding options and email notifications to customers and admins regarding new user requests approval. Overall, it’s an affordable and extremely flexible plugin to hide your WooCommerce store.

Top feature: It allows you to style and customize the default WooCommerce registration and login form by adding design elements like videos and images on the background and even changing its opacity – encouraging users to log in before accessing your store content.

Pricing: The Regular license costs $35.

WooCommerce Private Shop | Registered Users Shop

This is one of the most cost-effective private WooCommerce store plugins that offers secure and customizable features to hide your entire shop from non-login users or specific products.

It lets you automatically redirect all the non-logged-in users to the registrations and unlock the restrictions like purchasing products once they log in. Other features include manual or automatic user approval, enabling/disabling search engine indexing, and automatic emails sent to users and admins upon new user approval.

Top feature: You can create a custom WooCommerce login page by changing the logo or hiding or showing the user role field – which allows users to choose roles like Customer, Author, Administrator, or Editor.

Pricing: The Regular license costs $19.

Conclusion

Even though hiding your WooCommerce store might seem counterintuitive to driving maximum traffic and sales – it’s an outstanding solution if you want to sell customer-specific products, hide product catalogs, or sell premium products to VIPs and paid members.

The plugins mentioned above are some of the best options that offer the utmost flexibility to create membership levels, restrict store access, and hide product or price visibility from different users. However, the plugin you choose should ultimately depend on your specific store requirements and budget.

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