Restricting Product Access
This feature can be used to restrict access to your products to certain customers via group membership.
The purpose of restricting product access is to prevent customers from ordering restricted products. Restricted products cannot be ordered. In addition, you can control how (or if) restricted products appear by either hiding them entirely, showing them without pricing, or showing them with pricing.
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With this feature enabled, by default customers will have access to all products that do not have restrictions assigned to them or their category. |
Before you can restrict access to products, you must enable this feature. It is disabled by default.
- Open the store settings page
- In the Access Restrictions > Product Access Restrictions fieldset, check Restrict Product Access
- Choose how you want to handle restricted products using the Product Restriction field. Restricted products can't be purchased. This field controls whether or not they will be visible, and how they will appear if not hidden. Options for this field are:
hide restricted products
show restricted products without prices
show restricted products with prices
For SEO purposes, you are better off not hiding your products. If you are running a site where SEO is not as important, hiding products may be a good option. Products that are hidden won't be accessible. Should a product or category URL be followed that is restricted, the customer will get a 404 error from Squirrelcart.
- If you are not hiding your restricted products, the text in the Restrict Product Message will appear as an info message at the top of the product page to let the customer know they can't order. Adjust this text as needed.
- Click

After enabling product access restrictions, you'll need to restrict your products via group membership. You will need to create at least one group that you will put customers in to restrict access. If you do not have a group setup that can be used for this, create a group before continuing. A good name for this group would be Approved.
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If you have the News module installed, you have the ability to create special groups called News Groups. Do not use a news group to restrict access, as your customers will be able to join the group themselves on their account form by opting into the news group. |
- You can restrict a product in two ways - by restricting a category that it is in, and/or by restricting the product itself. If you need to restrict many products, it is faster to restrict them at the category level. Decide how you want to restrict (by category, or product) and continue.
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Category access restrictions will trickle down through all subcategories of the restricted category, and through multiple levels if present. |
- If you wish to restrict at the category level, open the category record you wish to assign the restriction to. If you wish to restrict at the product level, open a product record instead.
- Locate the Restrict Access to Group(s) fieldset
- Select the groups you wish to grant access to on the left and move them to the right with the blue arrow.
- Click

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