As a WooCommerce store owner, getting as many sales as possible is the lodestar of your business. The more orders you get, the higher revenue your business receives.
However, driving customers to your online stores doesn’t come as a simple task. While some advertise their products on multiple channels or even offering affiliates, others choose to promote their products via secret sales.
Unlike standard sales which provide special discounts for everyone, WooCommerce secret sales allow certain customers to purchase particular products at a cut-price. The others, without your permission, aren’t authorized to view or buy those products.
In this article, we will show you how to create secret sales in your WooCommerce store by password protecting sales products. Before we begin, let’s quickly look at 2 main reasons for creating secret sales with a few example use cases.
What are WooCommerce secret sales used for?
WooCommerce secret sales do more good than harm. Firstly, you can use them to reward your customers. This is a great way to generate brand loyalty, stay connected with premium consumers, and engage normal buyers to be high-end ones.
You can provide certain customers, for example, members, with private products that are not available to all types of buyers. They will get these goods for free or at a reduced price if they are granted access to the products.
Another reason for displaying secret sales on your site is to make it convenient for specific users to buy. To take one example, your wholesaler sells uniforms to many schools. Obviously, you need to create different uniform categories for each school that are inaccessible to others. You can lock each category including sales products with a password. Only clients entering the correct password can view their own category as well as secret sales.
Now, let’s move to the main part: how to create secret sales in the WooCommerce stores.
You might hear about membership websites allowing users with the correct roles to access your store. However, you can get mad when building a whole membership site, adding roles, and granting access to certain roles or users. Such a complicated process.
It’s recommended to create secret sales by password protecting your WooCommerce products or categories. Buyers with the correct passwords are able to see the sales and add items to their cart.
Password protect single WooCommerce product pages
It’s simple to lock your WooCommerce products. WordPress even comes equipped with a default feature letting you assign a password to individual WooCommerce product pages, in the exact same way as what you do for standard pages and posts.
All you need to do is go to the edit screen of your desired product → Enable the option Password Protected in the page Visibility section → Enter your password → Publish or update the product page.
What if you want to secure multiple products at the same time or set many passwords for a product? There is no solution better than a third-party plugin.
Password Protect WordPress Pro enables you to protect numerous products in the same place. Setting various passwords for a product page has never been easier.
To get started with PPWP Pro, you need to install and activate it in your WordPress site dashboard. After that, take these 5 steps:
- Go to the PPWP general Settings page
- Select Products in the Post Type Protection
- Scroll down to Password Protect Private Pages section and choose products with secret sales you want to secure
- Enter your password
- Save your changes
As a result, your customers have to enter the right passwords to reach secret sales.
In case you want to set various passwords for one product, Password Protect WordPress Pro supports that too. You can auto-generate or create as many passwords for a secret product as you would love to in a modern and friendly management popup.
We break the process into smaller steps below:
- Head to Products in your WordPress navigation menu
- Click “Password protect” of your desired product
- Generate a password automatically or add a new one on your own
The auto-created password will never expire. In other words, everybody can use it to access your secret sales at any time. Click the Edit icon in the Action column to limit your password usage or set the password expiration after a given time.
Password protect the entire shop page
Once protecting single products, you might think of your entire WooCommerce shop now. For instance, your private uniform store permits only one school to access. Instead of creating so many passwords for customers to open individual products every time they come to your site, why don’t you protect the whole shop page with a password?
When your customers enter the password to visit the protected shop, they can also view all the secure products.
WordPress doesn’t apply the password protection feature for the WooCommerce shop page. Even though your shop is assigned a password, it’ll still be visible to the public.
That’s why WooCommerce Integration from PPWP Pro comes in handy in this case. It’s possible for you to set a password for the shop page. Then, all of your products will become protected automatically with that password as well.
If buyers fill in the password form of the shop page, they are unlocking protected products simultaneously.
To password protect your WooCommerce shop page, firstly download and activate the extension in your WordPress plugin section.
Upon activation, the following guide shows you how to use the plugin:
- Visit Pages from your WordPress backend
- Look for your WooCommerce Shop page
- Click “Password protect” in the Password Protection column
- Hit the “Password protected this page” button
Your secret WooCommerce store becomes private to both search engines and the public now.
Make use of WooCommerce secret sales
Secret sales bring infinite value to both your WooCommerce stores and your customers. Only premium buyers can purchase limited-edition products. Your store, meanwhile, can generate brand loyalty with customers.
To create secret sales which specific people can access, you can either password protect your WooCommerce products individually or secure the entire shop page to save time.
Password Protect WordPress Pro and its WooCommerce Integration extension are recognized as the best solutions to secure your products and shop page. You can protect them with multiple passwords in less than one minute.
Install the plugins and effectively create secret sales for your WooCommerce store now!
