The Ultimate Guide To WooCommerce user roles

By default, WordPress comes with a user management system that gives different users certain permissions and restrictions. Accordingly, as the admin of the WordPress site, you assign different roles to other team members while keeping your confidential information and the site safe.

WooCommerce is an eCommerce platform built on WordPress. Then, it also allows you to set user roles. Compared to WordPress, there will be some additional WooCommerce user roles.

In this article, we will help you gain a deep understanding of WordPress WooCommerce users roles. Besides, we introduce you to how to add new user roles in WooCommerce.

Let’s get started!

User roles in WordPress and WooCommerce

Default user roles in WordPress

WordPress user roles refer to the permissions to perform specific actions of different users in WordPress sites. The actions are often called user capabilities. Each role will have different capabilities.

By default, there are six WordPress user roles. Please look at our table to see different roles and capabilities in WordPress:

• Super admin: has the highest level of access and control over the WordPress multisite network. If you only have a single WordPress site, this role is not available.
• Admin: has the highest authority in the single site and is often for the site owner. People with this role can do everything on the site content, install or delete plugins, and even add and delete users.
• Editor: perform any actions (writing, editing, publishing, and deleting) on all the posts on the site, including the posts created by other users. Besides, they can create new categories and moderate comments.
• Author: only has full control over their own content. They cannot access other users’ posts or take any actions on these posts.
• Contributor: can write, edit, and delete their own posts. But this role prevents the users from uploading files to the posts and publishing them on your site.
• Subscriber: only can sign in to the site to update their own profile and leave comments.

Additional user roles in WooCommerce

When you install and activate WooCommerce, two new user roles, Customer and Shop Manager, will be automatically added to your WordPress site.

• Customer: When someone makes a registration process in your store, he/she will be assigned this role. Once signing in to your site, they can see all their orders and edit their private profiles.
• Shop Manager: The system gives shop managers more permissions than customers, but less capabilities than administrators. This role allows users to manage all WooCommerce settings. You also can add, edit, and delete products, set up shipping and payment methods, and read WooCommerce reports.

How to create new user roles in WooCommerce with a plugin

Basically, WordPress and WooCommerce user management system provide you with fantastic options to manage users’ capabilities. That being said, in some cases, these default options cannot cover all your demands for an online store. You will want to create new user roles that will be responsible for other unpopular tasks.

Which case you may want to add new user roles

In this part, we will let you see when you need to assign new WooCommerce user roles. Following are the three typical scenarios you should consider.

• Membership sites: This is where only registered members can access content on the website. If you have such a site, you definitely want to classify different types of members. For instance, your membership sites have three membership plans, basic, plus, and pro plans, for different privilege levels. Then, you will want to create three corresponding user roles such as subscribers, premium members, and VIP members. Creating custom roles will help a lot in carrying out email marketing campaigns or giving special offers to certain member types.
• Wholesale stores: These stores often benefit from both retail and wholesale customers. Because the price levels for these two target customers are quite different, it is necessary to add new user roles and set up user role-based pricing.
• Members-only stores: It is a kind of private store. Only when someone becomes a member, they can view and buy in-store products. If they are normal visitors, you can hide products from them. For these members-only stores, setting up new WooCommerce user roles are quite useful.

Best plugins to create new WooCommerce user roles

To add new user roles in WooCommerce, you will need a plugin. Right now, we will introduce you to the best WooCommerce user roles plugins that provide store owners with lots of outstanding features.

Roles and Permissions for WooCommerce

This fantastic plugin is specifically designed for B2B WooCommerce stores. What makes the plugin stand out is that it offers business customers dozens of permissions after they create their own company accounts.

They will have a WooCommerce My Account page where they can not only view their orders but also add any users to their account, and assign different roles and permissions to them. Besides, buyers can create custom roles instead of only using the two default roles of Admin and User.

The plugin allows the admin to choose the member who will add items to the cart, share the cart and check out. Accordingly, the company owner can manage the account and team easily.

Another interesting feature of the plugin is setting a credit limit for your business buyers. Store owners and company users can view total credit, consumed credit, and available credit from the credit log (for you) or account dashboard (for users).

Pricing

You will have to spend $99 to have Roles and Permissions for WooCommerce for your B2B store with 1-year extension updates and support.

User Role Editor

If you are looking for a powerful tool that helps enhance your user role management for your WordPress or WooCommerce site, this plugin should be your choice.

With the User Role Editor plugin, you can change the current WooCommerce user roles and capabilities at your fingertips. The plugin allows you to select the capabilities to add to the roles you want. Besides, creating new roles is the feature every user expects from the plugin. You can customize these roles with various capabilities. What’s more, multiple roles can be assigned to a single user.

In addition to custom roles, the plugin gives you an option to add and edit new capabilities.

You also can remove any roles or capabilities from your WooCommerce site if they are not needed.

All the features above are for the free version. If you want to get more amazing features, please come to the pro version where you can create more user access restrictions. Particularly, you can control which user can access specific pages or posts on the site or which menu items to display for different users.

Pricing

If you want to use awesome features of the pro version, spend from $29 for the Personal plan.

Members – Membership & User Role Editor Plugin

This plugin is an excellent suggestion for those who want to manage user roles effectively in their WooCommerce sites. With Members – Membership & User Role Editor plugin, you can create, edit, and remove any roles or capabilities. Especially when you want to set any new WooCommerce user roles, it helps save time by cloning an existing role.

After you complete the role setup, the plugin lets you assign them to any users. It is noted that each user can be assigned multiple roles.

Furthermore, the plugin provides you with helpful shortcodes and widgets. If shortcodes help control user access to content, login form and user form widgets are used to show the theme’s sidebar.

With a simple user interface, the plugin helps you easily set up user permissions, especially for blog content. Besides, you can turn your site into a private one or only allow certain user groups to access it.

There are many other quality user role plugins you should consider using like User Role Editor, which comes with lots of awesome features for managing user roles.

In conclusion,

If you want to successfully manage the user system in your online store, you should spend time learning more about user roles. Once getting to know the functionality of all the roles and their capabilities, you will be excellent at managing your team and customers.

We also have introduced you to powerful plugins to create and customize WooCommerce user roles. You can consider the functionalities and prices of each plugin to select the most suitable one.

Thanks for reading our article. Is it helpful for you? If you have any interesting ideas on this topic, please let us know. Our team is so excited to hear from you.