How to Restrict Shipping to Logged-in WooCommerce Users

Running an eCommerce business in WooCommerce can be tough, especially if you’re a newcomer to the market. Growing your business is a near-constant task that one must focus on if they want to achieve success, and there’s no better growth method than retaining customers. And while you could gamble on the quality of your products or services, it means that you’re taking a huge risk instead of using well-known and reliable methods of customer retention. 

By enabling special benefits to your logged-in users and restricting those who aren’t logged in, you are incentivizing your customers to sign up to your website. This way, both you and your customer profit since your customer receives benefits, and as they now have an account on your website, the chances of them being a returning customer to your website are increased. 

If you offer a constant incentive for using your website while logged in, you have a near-complete guarantee the customers will return. After all, why would a customer use a restricted version of the website when they could just log in and reap the rewards. Not to mention how having an established profile also improves customer convenience, which is a major factor in keeping your user experience high. And by restricting shipping methods, you can control in what way your product comes to the customer. 

This can be incredibly important if you’re, for example, working with delicate electronics or art, which could get damaged if it’s shipped to the customer via conventional postal services. Or maybe you are handling other delicate products, and you’d like to give your customers discreet shipping labels. Either way, by providing certain options only to your logged-in customers, your business will grow, and your returnee customer base will be on an upward trend. 

And if you’re not in the know-how, restricting shipping to logged-in users can be quite complex, which is why you should utilize WooCommerce Table Rate Shipping to simplify the process and make your job easier.

How do you restrict shipping to logged-in users?

The first thing you need to do in your WooCommerce settings is set up your shipping zone. This is quite a basic step which you need to do for your business in general, not just for this specific task.

But while you’re creating a shipping zone, under shipping methods, you should select the WooCommerce Table Rate Shipping plugin. 

There you can enter the plugin and choose shipping methods such as logged-in or not logged-in. These shipping methods are basically a ruleset through which you can control which customer sees what shipping method. You can pick and choose various conditions such as minimum or maximum price value, the base amount of shipping price, the number of items, or even their weight.

The most important of these factors is the base amount of the shipping price, as that’s the main way your customers will gain benefits. With it, you can set different shipping prices for your products and even add on other benefits for your customers. 

When you’re setting up your shipping method for logged-in users, and this is crucial, make sure you check the box “Only for Logged in Users” as these shipping methods aren’t automatically differentiated, and it’s up to you to do so. 

Next to that box lays another marked “Hide Other Methods”, and if you check it, you’ll be able to hide the standard (not logged in) shipping method. 

Other benefits of restrictive shipping methods

Now, as stated earlier, restricting shipping methods to gain more users to sign up for your website is a massive asset. But there are other benefits to this tool when it comes to restrictive shipping methods. For example, if you’re running an eCommerce website that focuses on some niche products that may impact your customer’s wallet for quite a sum, it might be beneficial to create shipping methods that give a discounted shipping rate for bulk purchases. That way, your customers are incentivized to purchase larger amounts of your product to save on shipping rates (make sure you properly advertise this benefit too, after all, the key to success lies in marketing). 

And if you have specific locations that are especially far away from your standard shipping routes, make sure to create specialized shipping rates for these as well. 

And with the tip about hiding other shipping methods we mentioned earlier, your customers won’t even know that their product requires additional funds for getting to their destination. 

As a very realistic example, people often wonder why Australian prices for items shipped from Europe or the U.S. are so high, and this is the reason. The only way a website can make a profit while catering to the international (in this case, Australian) audience is by having increased shipping rates. After all, those products will be shipped across the globe.

The same principle applies with shipping by weight; after all, if your customer wants to purchase something that is quite bulky, they’d be willing to pay extra so that the product is handled with special care.

Being able to change and edit your shipping labels is another crucial benefit of WooCommerce Table Rate Shipping, as having a custom label for each and every shipping method creates a personal feel for your customer, which undoubtedly enhances their user experience. And as an added benefit, it helps you keep track of your shipping methods.

Conclusion

To summarize, having multiple shipping methods that offer different benefits to logged-in customers incentivizes them to return to your website, thus improving not only your profit margins but your general website traffic as well. Knowing how to utilize restrictive shipping on other factors is important, too, since, through them, you can also encourage your customers to do further shopping.

All in all, WooCommerce Table Rate Shipping is an extremely easy-to-use plugin that can massively improve your eCommerce business while providing an absolutely necessary feature you’d have to utilize anyway.