Wholesale and private catalogues in WooCommerce: show products only to certain customers or roles

#The situations this solves

• Wholesale. Trade customers buy from a range and at prices retail visitors must never see.
• Client-specific products. An agency or printer sells items that exist for one client only.
• Members-only collections. A range for logged-in members, invisible to everyone else.
• Soft launches. A new range visible to staff and a test group before it goes public.

WooCommerce has no visibility model beyond "published" and "private", and "private" hides the product from everyone but administrators. Dragon Product Visibility adds a proper one: a product hidden from you is gone from the shop, search, category archives and its direct URL, not merely unlisted.

#Step 1: set up roles for the audiences

Visibility by role needs roles that mean something. WooCommerce gives you Customer and Shop Manager; add a Wholesale role (any role-editor plugin, or a one-line add_role() in a small plugin) and assign it to trade accounts on approval. For members, most membership plugins create a role; if yours does not, add one.

Per-customer visibility does not need roles at all.

#Step 2: restrict whole categories or tags

For ranges, work at the category level. Open Products, then Visibility Rules, pick a category or tag, and choose:

• Show only to the selected roles: only those roles can see it, and it is also hidden from logged-out visitors. This is the wholesale and members-only setting.
• Hide from the selected roles: everyone sees it except the roles you name. Useful for retail-only bundles that trade customers should not buy.

A rule on a category covers its sub-categories automatically. Managing rules needs the Shop Manager capability, so store staff can do this without being administrators.

#Step 3: restrict individual products

For the exceptions, edit the product and use the Visibility box: choose specific customers, roles, or both, who may see it. A rule on a product always takes precedence over a category or tag rule, so a single retail product inside a wholesale category, or one client's product inside a shared category, is handled without restructuring the catalogue.

Client-specific products are the per-customer case: pick the client's account and nobody else, logged in or not, can find the product.

#Step 4: test as the visitor, not as yourself

Administrators see everything, which makes testing in your own session useless. Check each rule three ways:

1. Logged out, in a private window: hidden products must be absent from the shop, search and archives, and their direct URL must not resolve.
2. As a customer with the wrong role: same result.
3. As a customer with the right role: visible, purchasable, and present in search.

Check the sitemap and any product feeds too. Hidden products should not be advertised in places the rules do not cover; if a feed plugin reads products directly, exclude the restricted categories in that plugin as well.

#Pricing and the rest of the wholesale stack

Visibility is one half of wholesale. Trade pricing, minimum quantities and tax treatment are the other half and belong to a pricing plugin or WooCommerce's own role-based options. Keep the two concerns separate: visibility decides who can see and buy; pricing decides what they pay. The rules here stay simple as a result.

#Related reading

Wholesale accounts are worth protecting: enforcing two-factor authentication covers extending 2FA to customer accounts. And when a trade order lands, WooCommerce order webhooks gets it to the warehouse.

#Checklist

• Roles created and assigned for each audience
• Category rules set for each range
• Per-product exceptions set where a category rule is wrong for one item
• Tested logged out, with the wrong role, and with the right role
• Feeds and sitemap checked for leaks