How Create WooCommerce Users Who Can Only View and Edit Products

The PublishPress Capabilities plugin is one of the most popular ways to control permissions for WooCommerce.

One PublishPress user wrote to us and asked this question:

I'm using WooCommerce and want to create a role called “Product Manager” and the only thing I want this role to do is have access to Products.

This is possible with PublishPress Capabilities. You can create a WordPress user who can access WooCommerce products, but nothing else.

Video guide

Text and screenshot guide

First, you will need to install WooCommerce and the PublishPress Capabilities plugin.

Next, we're going to create a new role called “Product Manager”. We're going to copy the existing “Subscriber” role because it provides a good, basic set of permissions.

• Go to “Capabilities” in your WordPress admin menu.
• Using the dropdown in the top-left corner, choose “Subscriber”.
• Enter “Product Manager” in the box labeled “Copy Subscriber Role”.
• Click “Copy”.

• Make sure the “Product Manager” role is selected when the page refreshes.
• In the center of the screen, select all the boxes in the “Products” row:

We're now going to add a new permission to give Product Managers access to the WordPress admin area. Click here for more info on admin area access with WooCommerce.

• Find the “Add Capability” box.
• Enter “view_admin_dashboard”.
• Click “Add to role”.

• Select the “view admin dashboard” box.
• Click “Save Changes”.

• Now you can add a user to your new “Product Manager” role:

At this point, you can test the new user account: the User Switching plugin is very helpful for this.

When your new user logs in, all they will see is the “Products” screen and the “Profile” area.