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At times, you may want to limit access to certain parts of your site to new visitors, while giving access to existing customers. For example, established customers may get access to support pages that are not available to visitors, or, you may have a set of products that you only allow existing customers to purchase.
Shift4Shop offers a way to control the access of products, categories, and information pages, based on the customer's group. This article will explain how to protect categories, products, and information pages.
Part I – Creating and assigning a Customer Group
To begin, let's create a customer group:
Note
If you've already created your customer groups, skip to Part II
While logged into your Shift4Shop Online Store Manager:
- Go to Customers Manage Groups
- Once there, click on the "+Add New" button at the top right of the page
- Enter a group name, and if necessary set a minimum order amount that a customer in this group must meet before being able to check out.
- Select the Price Level.
Additional Information
Price Level 1 is the store's standard, retail price. If you are going to be oferring adiscount for this group, select anything other than Price Level 1.
Make note of the price level you assigned as you will need to update the products with customized pricing for this level in Part IIIof this guide.
- Click "Add"
The customer group is now created.
Note
Now that the group is created, additional options are available. Click on the "Edit" button for the group you just created and you will see the following new options.
- Non-Taxable
This basically makes purchases for anyone in this group non-taxable.
- Allow Registration
This setting lets customers register for this type of account by themselves from a registration page on your website. When you enable this option an option for "Auto Approve" will also appear which you can turn on or off. When auto approve is on, customers can register and start using their account right away. Alternately, if this setting is turned off, you will be notified that they registered and must enable the account in order for them to start purchasing.
Next, let's assign one or more customers to this group...
While logged into your Shift4Shop Online Store Manager:
- Go to Customers Customer List
- Select 1 or more customers (using the checkboxes next to the customer's name)
- Scroll to the bottom and on the "Batch Action" area
- Using the drop down menu, select the customer group you created.
- Click Apply to have the records moved to this new group
Part II - Protecting the Store
Now we'll go over several ways to configure individual sections of your store so that they are only viewed by your customer group.
A) Protecting Categories
From your Shift4Shop Online Store Manager:
- Go to Products Categories
- Find the category of your choice and click on its name to open up the category's options screen
Note, you can also look to the far right of the category and click on its "Action Details" button
- Next, look to the right hand side of the page and click on the +Icon for "Access Permissions"
- Under "Discount Group" change the selection to your created customer group.
You can select All, Registered Users (Customers who do not belong to a specific group), or Select Specific - which will allow you to select individual or multiple customer groups.
B) Protecting Products
To protect the whole store with one global setting:
- Go to Settings General Store Settings
- Look along the top and click on the "Checkout" tab
- Within the Checkout tab, look for a section labeled "Require Login"
- Specify your settings as needed*.
- Click Save
*Additional Information
In the Require Login area, you will have the ability to specify the following options.
- Not Required
Products may be viewed and purchased without requiring a customer login.
- To Buy
Customers are required to log into their account in order to purchase the item
- To View Price
Customers are required to log into their account in order to view the item's pricing information and to purchase the item
- To View Product
Customers are required to log into their account in order to view any information about the product, including pricing and purchasing options.
To protect individual items instead of a global setting:
- Go to Products Product List
- Select the product you'd like to protect and click its ID, Name or look to the far right and use its "Action Edit" button
- In the Advanced Tab of the item, look for the "Login Required" drop down menu and select a login requirement
- Click Save
This will open up a separate sub-section labeled "Allow Access" which will allow you to further specify a Customer Group for the product's viewability
- Specify your desired Customer Group
- Click Save
C) Protecting Information Pages
To protect your site content pages:
- Go to Content Site Content
- Look to the far right and click "Action Content" for the page you'd like to protect
- In the Allow Access section, change the group to your created customer group.
Additional Information
When controlling access to a product or page, you may want to specify a URL (web address) to redirect the client to if they are not part of that group.
For example, if you only allow access to the "wholesale" information page to customers in "Group 1", then, on the "On Fail Redirect to:" field, enter the URL of a page that explains how one may gain access to this page.
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