Question: Can Customer Fields prevent customers from seeing website content until I approve them?
Answer: No, but Customer Fields provides the framework to help you achieve this simply.
Common example: Wholesalers
It's common among merchants with wholesale customers to want to restrict access to certain content (or in some cases, the entire store) until a customer has been approved as a wholesaler.
Understanding the problems
There are two distinct problems here:
Collecting additional information from customers in order to approve their account as a wholesaler
Locking unauthorized customers out of certain parts of the storefront (products/pricing, collections, navigation items, etc.)
Customer Fields is not designed to fix both of these problems, but it's an essential piece of the puzzle. Here's why...
Collecting customer information
Customer Fields enables you to:
customize a registration form
collect important information from customers
organize/segment customers
All of these are important steps in the process of approving new wholesale customers and restricting unauthorized access to wholesale products or pricing.
Locking unauthorized customers out
To restrict access to your store, you will either need to use an app like Locksmith or hire a Shopify developer to write some custom code for you. There are many guides (such as this one) that demonstrate how to hide products/collections using Liquid code (usually based on customer tags), but no code solution is "one size fits all".
This is why we recommend using the Locksmith app; it's a powerful and flexible tool specifically built for access control. And it just so happens to work wonderfully in conjunction with Customer Fields 👍
Recommended flow
Here's a snapshot into an ideal flow used by a significant number of wholesale merchants:
Use Customer Fields to create unique registration form(s) to collect important information from your wholesale customers
Enable account approval so you can review/approve customers
Automatically tag customers (eg: “B2B”) who complete your wholesale registration form (if using account approval, the tags are added to Shopify after customers are approved)
Use Locksmith to restrict access to the entire store, certain products, collections, menu items, etc. based on customer tags
Your needs may vary
Keep in mind that the flow above is just one example -- there's lots of other use-cases and flows that can be handled as well! Make sure to browse the rest of our help center for more information on all things Customer Fields, and feel free to reach out to our Support team via chat or email if you need any guidance 😎