How You Should Handle Product Visibility in Magento 2
Any online store that fills up its stock may want to gain maximum visibility and exposure to a mass more profit, whereas, every product of a web shop may not be suitable or meant for all the audiences. There, you may need to put different features in place for controlling the display of different products, pages, and categories to specific users.
Magento 2 is equipped with all the mandatory tools to manage and look after an online store, whereas, it lacks some of the features you may need. You will have to alter the code by a professional to extend its functionality or install a plugin.
For overseeing product visibility, one of the useful tools is Restrict Products by Customer Group as it allows controlling the product display with multiple aspects. Try the following methods in handling product visibility with custom coding or the extension we have mentioned.
Confine catalog to specific customer groups
Move to customers tab, navigate to the customer groups, and click ‘Add New Customer Group.’ you can segregate customers with respect to their ordering history. Their consistency and frequency in purchases may take them to a loyal group of users, whereas others may qualify as retailers, occasional visitors, or as you separate them.
Now, with the help of a plugin, you can manage the visibility by enabling Restrict Products by Customer Group. The tool allows different options to ban all or specific customer groups from selected items from your catalog.
You can utilize the feature for stopping the unregistered users from visiting the different product pages. This will result in higher sign-ups as the eagerness to browse your store catalog; they will register and share their personal details.
Restrict Customers’ access by Store views
Every Storeview you may have on your store is meant to cater to people of a defined region, language, and currency. If you allow people across the globe to visit any of your store views, they may land on to products neither manufactured nor displayed for them. Further, they will not understand the language.
Why not confining them to a relevant storefront while restricting from the rest of your store? This may give you the advantage to serve only the targeted customers on a Store view. You can utilize the same tool as discussed above for limiting the customers from certain Store views, whereas, for a more refined visibility check, you can install extensions like default store switcher that automatically takes users to the right store on a multiregional eCommerce website.
Hide Selected Products, Categories, and CMS pages
You may want certain products or pages to remain private and confidential. For example, if you are not manufacturing or managing a specific product, but may plan to deal in the future, you can just hide them for a specific period.
With the help of restriction rules provided in the extension, you can hide selected products, categories, and CMS pages for a specific time. Once the pre-configured time expires, the products will start showing again in your catalog.
Additionally, you can run private sales campaigns by slashing the prices of the products and restricting them to loyal customers. With this, only your repeat customers will be able to access the products and avail discounted prices.
Disable the display of static blocks from customers
Besides the products, categories, and CMS pages, the extension gives you the freedom to control the visibility of the static blocks on your store as well. There might be blocks showing related products, articles, deals, and discount offers, which you may not want everyone to avail. Step ahead of your competitors by defining the intended audience of this content.
Redirect Customers to alternative store/pages
One of the reliable methods of managing product visibility is setting redirections for restricted regions or customers. If you are stopping a user from a specific product, there might be other pages relevant and useful for him or her.
You can add a URL to redirect such users to an alternative page, where they feel more comfortable to shop around. For this, you may need to alter the code of each page to feed the alternative URL, whereas, for setting redirections in bulk, you can seek an extension as a quick solution.
Final words
Usually, it is perceived that the higher the product visibility, the higher will be profits. However, these assumptions fade away when you have to account for the real conversions among the thousands of irrelevant traffic that were never interested in your products. Use the extension to filter out web traffic and have the users who deliberately searched and landed on the product pages.
