As an online store owner, you may want to block a customer from accessing your WooCommerce store. There could be several reasons for this. For example, if a customer is a fraudster, you may want to block him/her from your store to avoid fraud and spam customers OR maybe some other reasons.
However, besides WooCommerce being one of the most popular eCommerce solutions, WooCommerce doesn’t give you any built-in feature to block a customer from accessing your store.
You will need to use a plugin or a custom solution. Today, I’ll walk you through blocking a customer from your WooCommerce store. I’ll show you different methods to do so and you can use the one that suits you best.
Without, any further ado, let’s jump into the tutorial.
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How to Block a Customer in WooCommerce?
There are different plugins available in the market that allow you to block a customer from your WooCommerce store based on time, email address, IP address, and more. Some of them are free while others are paid.
For this tutorial, I’ll be using a free plugin that allows you to block a customer based on the time and date. It can help you block a customer temporarily as well as permanently.
The following are the steps to block a WooCommerce customer.
1. Install and Activate the User Blocker Plugin
First, we need to install the required plugin that will help us to block a specific customer. To install it, navigate to Plugins > Add New from your WordPress dashboard and search for ‘user blocker’ in the search bar.
You will see an ‘Install Now’ button right beside the plugin’s name. Click it to install the plugin. Once the plugin is installed, it will be replaced by the ‘Activate’ button.
You need to click it, to activate and use the plugin.
Note: I have already installed and activated the plugin so I could see the ‘Active’ button.
Once you have installed and activated the plugin, navigate to ‘User Blocker’ from your WordPress dashboard to block a customer.
3. Block a Customer in WooCommerce
On the plugin’s settings page, you’ll see the list of all the available users in your store. You can block a customer based on three attributes.
I’ll explain each one in detail.
3.1. Block a Customer by Time
This plugin allows you to block a customer by time which means you can block a customer for a specific time range in a day.
For example, You may be running some tests or a sale that is customer-specific. You could block a user from 4 PM to 6 PM on Monday. It means the selected customer will be blocked on Monday for the time range you set.
You can even set a block message and a redirection link to any page to let customers know why they can’t access the site/store.
3.2. Block a Customer by Date
You can also block a customer for a specific period based on dates. It will help you temporarily block customers from your WooCommerce store.
For example, you want to block a customer for a week from your store. You can set a start date and an end date to block a customer.
You can also add a block message and a redirection URL.
3.3. Block a Customer Permanently
The third way to block a customer is to block him/her permanently from your store. Remember it should be done according to your store’s policies to avoid any legal issues.
You can also display a custom message on the front end and redirect customers to another page to let them know why they are blocked.
4. Configuring the Settings
For this tutorial, I have blocked a customer permanently from my demo store. Here are the steps to block a customer permanently in WooCommerce.
4.1. Select the User
First, you need to select the users you want to block from your store. You can either select users based on their ‘Username’ or the ‘User Role’. I have selected the users based on their usernames so I can see all the users in my store.
4.2. Select a Customer to Block
After that, you need to select the customer that you want to block permanently from your store. To select the customer, you can check the checkbox right before its name.
4.3. Set a Block Message
After selecting the user, you need to add a message to let them know they have been blocked from the site, in the ‘Block Message’ field.
If you don’t set a message, they will see a default message that says ’You are permanently blocked.’ I have set a custom message to make it more clear to customers why they have been blocked.
You can also add a redirection URL to redirect customers to a custom page to let them know about getting blocked from your store.
5. Save Changes
Once you have made all the configurations, you need to click the blue ‘Block User’ button at the bottom left corner of your screen to save the settings and block the selected customer from your WooCommerce store.
6. Final Results
Once the settings are saved, let’s test the final results.
To test it, I visited my demo store using the credentials of the user I blocked from my store. When I visited the store and tried to log in, I could see the block message and I wasn’t able to access the store.
Note: For this to be more helpful make sure, you do not allow guest checkouts in your store. If you are allowing customers to shop without creating or signing in to an account, blocking the customer will not be helpful.
You can disable the guest checkout by navigating to WooCommerce > Settings > Accounts & Privacy and make sure to uncheck the ‘Allow customers to place orders without an account’ checkbox.
Also don’t forget to save the settings.
Conclusion
That’s it for today’s article.
I hope it was helpful to you and you were able to block a customer from your WooCommerce store. It can help you in several ways depending on why you blocked a customer.
For example, it could help you increase profitability by blocking the customer who returns a lot.
You could also delete the user’s account but there are chances that they will recreate the account and shop from your store. This plugin will help you avoid such cases and block a customer permanently or for a specific time limit from your store.
