Shipping rates by user roles in WooCommerce

Offering different shipping rates by user roles can turn guests into customers, visitors into club members or make the diference into your marketing plan. You can use it to boost your sales, increase registrations or give special treat to your community of users. In this post we will see how to do it with Fish and Ships and what advantages it can give you.

Flexibility in shipping rates by user roles

With Fish and Ships, you can use, in the shipping rates calculation conditions, a new selector: user role.
This means that you can set a condition combining any role (or roles), with any other selector: shipping class, price, weight, quantity, volume, measures, category… and set any shipping cost and/or perform any special action: messages, coupons, blocks…
For example: members of your club buying products from the book category. Or incentivize registration by offering a discount on shipping costs.

Full compatibility with 3rd party user roles

You can create the conditions with any user role, whether created by WordPress (subscriber, editor, administrator), WooCommerce (customer) as well as those created by any other plugin or theme (member club, etc). You can also install any user roles plugin, create some roles and use them with Fish and Ships if you need to.

Discounted shipping to incentivize signup

Perhaps your store has enabled the possibility to make purchases as a guest customer. This option has a big advantage: reducing checkout steps will reduce the number of abandoned carts, boosting your sales. But it also has
flaws: these same customers will have to re-enter their data the next time, so it is more unlikely that they will be loyal to your store. And we won’t have complete data on these guest customers.

Offering a discount on shipping rates can be a friendly, unobstructive way to incentivize registration, let’s see how we can offer a special rate to registered customers:

But we can do it better: taking advantage of the fact that all Fish and Ships features are combinable with each other,
we can display a message to unregistered users, inviting them to do so and get advantages:

Free shipping for members

Maybe your online store has a members club. And you want to offer free shipping to your members. This can be done with a single rule in the rules table. And we can rename the shipping method also, or run any other special action:

Restrict shipping methods by user roles

Suppose we have a preferred shipping system, via UPS, for partners. By combining the user role selector with the special action “Hide other shipping methods” we can hide this method for non-partners. This will work with any shipping method from any other manufacturer, not just Fish and Ships, for example local pickup or flat rate. (read more: hide shipping methods on WooCommerce)

Restrict some products by user roles

You can also restrict some products by user roles. For example: club badges only can be purchased for your motorcycle members club. Or maybe some professional products are only available for distributors. Or you sell online webinars and after that promote your customers to expert role and only in this case can purchase some products. There are infinite possibilities.

Put a first rule (#1) that filter your allowed users, and skip for them the next rule (#2), which has the locking special action when there is badges on cart:

Restrict sales by user role

By setting a condition that show an error on checkout extended to all methods, we will block the possibility to finish the checkout process by user role. For example, for users who do not belong to our club: they will be able to see our products, put them in the cart, but not finish the checkout. And you can show them a message encouraging to be a memeber first. (read more about: hidding shipping methods on WooCommerce)

Restrict product price by user role

In addition to offering different shipping rates based on user roles, you can modify the price of one or more products in your store and set a rule to show the modified prices to specific user roles. Although WooCommerce has no option for restricting product price by user role, you can use iThemeland Role Based Pricing for WooCommerce to do this task.

Using this plugin, allows you to specify exact prices for each simple or variable product or hide prices and add to cart button for selected users.

There are flexible options in the plugin for adjusting WooCommerce product prices including:

• Fixed pricing: You can use this option to set a new price for multiple products and show them to the specified user role for specific user roles.
• Fixed increase/decrease: This is a good option when you want to increase/decrease the current price by a fixed amount:
• Percentage increase/decrease: This option helps you to increase/decrease the current price by percentage for specific user roles.

Setting up pricing rules for different user roles will make your website more flexible. It is an ideal solution when you want Managers, Customers, Guests, and other user roles in your website to see different prices for the same products in your store.

Offer 20% discounts on all products to the customers role

To offer 20% discounts to customers role, follow these instructions:

• Install and activate iThemeland Role Based Pricing for WooCommerce.
• Go to the Rules page and press the Add Rule button.

• In the Rule Page, you have to set the following fields:
  • Title: Write a description like 20% Discount for customers
  • Mark Apply on All Products
  • In the Role Based Pricing section, locate the Customer role.
  • Choose Percentage Decrease from the Adjustment type list.
  • Write 20 in the Value field.
  • Press the Add Rule button.