Ability to purchase vs. View prices
Among the store settings there is an option to prevent retail customers - or even all customers - from placing an order. Here we will discuss the steps you need to take if you want to not only prevent customers from placing an order, but even from seeing prices. The ability to purchase, in other words, is handled separately from the ability to see a price.
You might want to use your store as a catalog-only (no purchasing) Web site, and yet still want to display prices on it. You might want to use it as a catalog that contains no pricing information. Or that it shows pricing information only to certain customers. With ProductCart you can do all of the above. Let's see how.
Hiding prices from retail customers
To hide prices from customers that visit your store (whether or not they register an account), simply set the Online Price to 0. The wholesale price (and/or prices associated with Customer Pricing Categories) can still be > 0, but the online price will have to be = 0 for it to be automatically hidden.
To quickly set the Online Price to 0, you can use the Global Changes feature:
- Select Products > Update Multiple Products > Global Changes
- Select ALL products
- Select “Recalculate the online price” as “0%” of the “Wholesale Price”
- Run the Global Change (note that this action cannot be undone)
Running Global Changes CANNOT be undone.
You can also export and re-import the products whose online price needs to be set to 0.
Hiding prices from some customers and not others
Use the instructions above to hide prices from casual visitors to your online store. What if you want other customers (e.g. reseller or distributors) to be able to see prices and purchase products:
- Set up the store to allow wholesale customers to purchase (store settings)
- Make sure that your products or services have a wholesale price that is > 0
- Create a Customer Pricing Category with “wholesale privileges”
- Set it so that the prices are calculated off of the “wholesale price”
- Assign customers to the pricing category you just created
When any of those customers log into the store, they will see prices that are based off of the settings you entered when you created that pricing category (you can override prices at the product level, if needed), and will be able to purchase products at those prices. If they are not logged in, they will not see any prices and will not be able to purchase anything.