How & Why You Should Manage Product Visibility in Magento?

Why Manage Product Visibility in Magento?

The following are some of the reasons where you may want to manage product visibility in your eCommerce store.

1. Control Over Display

When displaying all products, you are effectively losing control over what products customers can view and interact with. If you have a lot of products, too much choice can prevent visitors from making a decision. By controlling which products are visible, you can opt to display only relevant products to the customer. This not only enhances the shopping experience but can also improve sales.

2. Search Engine Optimization

SEO is an integral part of an eCommerce store’s marketing strategy. Without organic traffic, your store’s performance cannot reach its full potential. What’s the relationship between Magento 2 restrict products for customer group and SEO? Well, by controlling which products are indexed, you can ensure that only relevant pages are indexed. This prevents non-relevant pages from being indexed and affecting your SEO score.

3. Marketing Strategies

Given the high level of competition in the eCommerce sector, online stores need to focus on differentiation. Marketing is an effective way to create points of differentiation and place your store ahead of the competition. By making certain products viewable more prominently, especially during promotional campaigns, you can boost sales for that product.

4. Shipping Restrictions

Suppose your eCommerce store operates in two markets – A and B. Product X is legal in market A but not B. It makes little sense to allow customers from market B to view the product given they cannot order it. Therefore, when there are shipping restrictions in place, it is better to manage the product visibility. When customers can view a product but not order it, this leads to negative customer experience.

5. Customer Segmentation

Lastly, each online store has different types of customers, such as first-time buyers, infrequent buyers, and frequent buyers. If a store treats loyal customers and first-time buyers similarly, it is indicative of poor customer relationship management. You need to treat your high-volume customers with priority and give incentives to first timers to make their first purchase. Managing the product visibility in Magento 2 allows stores to differentiate each customer group.

This sums up the several reasons why you need to know about the Magento restrict products by customer group feature. Now, let’s see how to restrict products in your Magento 2 store.

Magento 2 Restrict Products by Customer Group

Magento 2 restrict products by customer group extension is an ideal tool to use to implement product visibility by customer groups. It allows you to show selected products, categories, and CMS pages to selected customer groups and hide them from others. .

How to Use the Extension?

• After installing the extension, login to your Magento backend.
• Click FME EXTENSIONS -> Manage Rules
• Click Add Rule to create a new rule.

I have created the following different use cases to restrict products, categories and CMS pages by customer groups, redirect restricted customers or pages to other pages or show them a custom message.

Case 1: Restrict Products from Non-Logged In customers

• In this case, we prevent not logged in customers from viewing certain products. The extension does this effortlessly.
• Give the rule a Title, set its Priority, select Store View and Customer Group as shown below.

• You can also apply the rule for a limited time by specifying the Start & End date. Set the Status to ‘Enabled’. Here we want to display an error message to the restricted user instead of redirecting them to another page so ‘Error Message’ is selected in the Restricted Customer Response dropdown.

• Now under the ‘Products’ Tab, choose the products that you want to restrict.

Case 2: Restrict a Category to Wholesale Customers Only

In this case, we want to restrict a specific product category from ‘Retailer’ customer group so that only Wholesale users can view it. To do this, select ‘Retailer’ in the Customer Groups field. This means the product category will be restricted from retailers. You can choose to display a custom message to the restricted user as shown below.

• Now under the Products tab, select the category you want to restrict.

Case 3: Hide a Category from Menu for Not Logged In Customers

In case you want to hide a particular category from top menu from a particular customer group say not logged in customers, you can do this easily with the extension. Just select ‘Non Logged In’ in the Customer Groups option and under the Categories tab, select the category that you want to hide. In this case, we have hidden the ‘Bags’ category.

Case 4: URL Redirections

You can also redirect the users to another internal or external webpage. In the following example, we redirect the ‘About Us’ page to ‘Privacy Policy’ page. Under the URL Conditions tab, provide the From and To URL’s.

You can also redirect one category or product to another product or CMS page.

As you can see there is so much you can do with this extension when it comes to managing catalog visibility in your Magento 2 store. You can come up with many other use cases and configure the extension accordingly. For any customization work or queries, don’t hesitate to contact our support team.