5 Easy Steps To Hide Products on Shopify

If you are an e-commerce store owner in 2024, you might know the importance of personalizing the shopping experience for your customers. Every user that visits your store is different in characteristics and purchasing patterns. At times, especially if you have multiple products in your store, you might want certain customers to see some products and restrict them to others.

Hiding products on Shopify is hence a need if you run an e-commerce store with multiple products and want to give exclusivity to your specific customers. This especially applies to stores that run a B2B + D2C combined store, since there are certain products limited to B2B customers only. In this quick guide, we will first discuss when there could be a need to hide products on Shopify and then the steps to do the same in your store.

When should you hide products on Shopify?

There are some instances where a need to hide certain products on your Shopify store arises. Let’s look at some of those instances.

Out-of-stock items: Whenever products go out of stock, it is always a great practice not to display them on your storefront as it might ruin the customer’s shopping experience and they will be less likely to visit your store again in the future.

Wholesale-only products: If you sell both direct-to-customer and business-to-business in your store, there are always some products that are made only for B2B or B2C or some individual products on discounts. Hence, you should hide them from specific customers to avoid any confusion.

Seasonal or products that are for a limited time: There might be products that you only sell during specific seasons like Christmas, Easter, etc., or flash sales. In such cases, you should hide products during times other than those and display them again when the season comes. This saves you the time to create and delete products on your store.

Pre-launch/Development/Invite-only products: If you are planning to launch some products but want to create buzz before launching them, hiding them could be a great way to build anticipation. Also, if you are testing out some features of your store and product-related aspects, you should hide them to maintain a smooth functioning site.

5 Steps to Hide Product on Shopify Store (Without Using an App)

Alright! Let us now guide you through the steps to hide products on your Shopify store without the need to install any app. We’ll discuss both hiding products and collections on Shopify. 

Steps to Hide Products on Shopify

STEP 1: Access your Shopify store by logging in with your admin credentials.
STEP 2: Once you enter your store’s dashboard, the next step is to head to the ‘Products’ section. The same is displayed in the below screenshot.

STEP 3: Now, Select all the products that you want to hide from your customers, and click on the three option dots located in the top right corner of the dashboard. Take reference from the below screenshot.

STEP 4: Now, click on the ‘Exclude from sales channel’ option that comes up after you click on the three dots. 

Step 5: Next, choose where you want to hide the products from. That is, if you have products on your ‘Online Store’ sales channel then you select the same and click on the ‘Exclude Products’. Take reference from the below screenshot of the same. 

And that’s about it! You have successfully hidden the products from your online store. 

You can confirm the same by visiting your online store and searching for the product. The product won’t show up as it was excluded from all sales channels.

Steps to Hide Collections on Shopify

If you want to hide a group of products that you have listed in a collection, you can follow the below steps.

STEP 1: Go to the ‘Collections’ setting under the ‘Products’ in your Shopify admin dashboard.

STEP 2: Select the collections by ticking the box next to them, and click on ‘Exclude from sales channel’. See the below screenshot for reference.

And that’s it! This way you can hide a collection(s) from your Shopify store dashboard. You can confirm the same using the process we discussed above for hiding products on Shopify.

Hide products on Shopify store using a Shopify app

In the above sections, we discussed how you can hide products without installing a Shopify app in your store. But if you need more customization and flexibility to manage your store’s access in a more complex way and with additional access control management features, you need to have an app like Wholesale Lock Manager in your store.

There are numerous instances where you would want more complex access management tools in your store. For instance, if you run a wholesale store on Shopify, where you want to display certain products to certain customers and hide them from others, you would need an app where you can control this access based on customer tags. 

Not only this, using apps like Wholesale Lock Manager, you can hide prices of products from specific customers, implement login to view prices, hide collections, hide pages, implement password protection, and much more.

Let’s take a look at how you can hide products from specific customers on Shopify using the Wholesale Lock Manager app. 

(i) Head to the Wholesale Lock Manager app page, and install the app in your store.

(ii) Once you install the app, go to the dashboard and click on the Create lock button.

(iii) Now, name your lock and make the desired settings to hide specific products, prices, collections, storefronts, pages, or URLs from logged-in customers, selected customers or visitors with a passcode.

(iv) Next, you can choose to hide the selected products from the listings, search results, and URLs for normal store visitors.

(v) Hit the Save button to save your lock.

And that’s it. 

Using the above app, you can control exactly who sees what on your Shopify store. This way, you can customise the shopping experience for each one of your users and customers.

Summing up

Hiding products on your Shopify store can be a great way to be able to create a shopping experience on your store that feels curated for every user and super personalised. There could be multiple reasons when there could be a need to hide like managing out-of-stock items, exclusive wholesale products, or seasonal offerings. Hiding products on your store can help in improving customer satisfaction and also reduce the chances of any kind of confusion. 

You can use apps like Wholesale Lock Manager on the Shopify app store to easily manage product visibility without much hassle. For simple use cases, Shopify’s native functionality works well. However, for more complex scenarios requiring advanced access control and customization, apps provide the flexibility you need.

Ready to control visibility of your Shopify store? Try Wholesale Lock Manager for free.