Sometimes, there are certain people you just don’t want buying products on your WooCommerce store. But how do you stop them? One of the easiest was is to restrict WooCommerce registrations. The problem is that you can’t restrict user registrations out of the box with WooCommerce. Don’t despair! We’ve got the solution for you.
Naturally, because this is not “out of the box” WooCommerce functionality, you’re going to need to install a plugin. In this guide we’ll walk you through the whole process of getting a plugin installed to applying the actual restrictions. Let’s go…
Step 1: Install a plugin to restrict WooCommerce registrations
Firstly, let’s go ahead and install a plugin to add this functionality to WordPress/WooCommerce. Here at WP Geeks, we’re actually in the process of building out our own custom WooCommerce registration restriction plugin. It’ll only be ready towards the end of the year though. So in the meantime, we recommend that you install Restrict User Registrations from the WordPress plugin repository.
Go ahead and install it and once it’s been added to your store, move on to the next step.
Step 2: Configure the user registration restrictions
Now that the plugin is installed, navigate to “Users” from the left hand side WP Admin menu, and click on “Restrict registrations”. From this page you’ll be able to configure who and what you would like to restrict. Depending on what your use case is, you could add one of the following restrictions:
- Restrict specific usernames from being used. This is generally done if you want to reserve a username for a particular customer or future purpose.
- Restrict specific email addresses. This is where is gets more personal. If you want to stop a specific customer or person from registering and buying from your store, you can add their email to this section.
- Restrict email service providers. Lastly, you’re able to restrict registrations based on the email provider they use. An example would be restricting anyone who uses a Yahoo email account.
Once you’ve decided how you would like to apply your restrictions, go ahead and add them and save the settings. Here is what some example restrictions on our demo store look like.
Step 3: Test to make sure that users are being restricted
Now that your restrictions are in place, it’s a good idea to go ahead and verify that they’re working. This will validate that nothing was configured incorrectly or left out. To test, simply attempt to create a customer account with a banned username or email address. It should not allow the registration to go through.
We really hope that you found this guide on how to restrict WooCommerce registrations useful. If you have any questions, be sure to reach out in the comments below and we’ll do our best to assist you.