Product Restrictions
Learning Objective
After reading this guide you should have a better understanding of:
How to set up Product Restrictions within the Visualsoft Admin
How to manage Product Restrictions within the Visualsoft Admin
Contents
Written Guide
Overview
The Product Restrictions feature allows you to place further limitations or rules against some or all of your products. This could be due to rules that you are forced to comply with as a business, or rules that you want to put in place yourself.
By creating restrictions, you can limit specific orders being placed or block them altogether, where needed. Some examples of restrictions are setting a quantity limit against product purchases, blacklisting countries or postcodes so they cannot purchase specific products or applying custom taxation rules.
Adding a Product Restriction
To access the Product Restrictions section, you will need to navigate to Catalogue > Manage Products > Product Restrictions area within your Visualsoft Admin. Then click the Create Restriction button.
Upon landing on the ‘create Restriction’ page, you will be presented with the following sections.
Overview
Restriction Name: You can choose to give the restriction a name. This is optional but a good idea if you've got a lot of restrictions set up.
Restriction Active: Choose whether the restriction is currently active. This can also be managed on the main Restrictions menu.
Shipment Allowed: Most commonly, this will be set to 'No' because rules will tend to be created to avoid accepting the order e.g. if you're restricting the maximum product purchase quantity to 2 per customer and the customer has added 3, you would want to set this as 'No' to block the order being completed as the rules have been exceeded. You would set this as 'Yes' in an instance that you want to apply a basket message when the restriction is hit, but will still allow for the order to be accepted.
Match Any: In 99% of circumstances, this needs to be set to Yes - meaning that if the order breaches just one of the rules, it will be restricted. If this is set to 'No', it means that all of the rules have to be broken for the restriction to apply - not just one.
Criteria
This menu is where you will assign the products that are part of the restriction you're creating. The below information will explain how to make your selection.
All Products: The restriction will apply to all active products on the website.
Applicable Days: This is the number of days worth of orders that will be considered in the restriction. This will only work for rules where you're setting maximum order or product quantities (see below for Max Quantity Total & Max Quantity Per Product).
For example, if you were to set a product restriction of 2 per customer and set Applicable Days to 60, the customer would need to wait 60 days before they could order that product again.
Applicable Categories/Brands/Attributes/Tags: This allows you to select a whole department or brand etc.
PLEASE NOTE: If you select 'Mens' and 'Black' and 'Adidas', only products that are in the Men's department AND branded as Adidas AND also tagged as Black will be part of the restriction - a customer could still check out if the item was a black Adidas product if it was not also part of the mens department (this is an important distinction to note, as in other areas of the admin such as the Sales & Discounts menu it would include all products from all three criteria).
Applicable Products: Click the 'Add Products' button to manually choose specific products.
Rules
This menu is where you will apply the rules to the products you've added (above) to determine whether they are restricted.
Minimum Age: Enter a minimum purchase age for restricted products.
Max Quantity Total: Set a limit on how many products can be purchased in this restriction.
Max Quantity Per Product: Similar to above, but set on a product level i.e. if you want to restrict certain products to 2 per customer, you can enter this here. Remember that you can set Applicable Days that this covers, see above.
Country: Blacklist countries so that a shopper from that country is part of the restriction i.e. if you don't want to sell specific products to Canada, you can move Canada to the Blacklist and they won't be able to check out.
Postcode: Restrict orders based on postcode. If you want to apply more than one postcode, you can enter them separated by a comma e.g. AB1, AB2, AB3
State & Zip Code: This will only display if we have enabled it and it will replace the Country and Postcode function.
Messages
We would always recommend that you create a message to inform the customer of why the restriction is in place and why they may have problems checking out. For example, if you've created the restriction because you're limiting the customer to up to 2 specific products every 30 days, this needs to be visible on the website so the customer understands this.
There are 4 different areas where you can add a message. All messages are explained below:
Additional Options
Editing/disabling a Product Restriction
To access the Product Restrictions section, you will need to navigate to Catalogue > Manage Products > Product Restrictions area within your Visualsoft Admin.
Action - This will take you to the same screen that you were initially presented with when creating the product restriction. From within this screen, you can make modifications to the restriction itself.
Active - This will allow you to enable and disable a product restriction you have set up.
Can Ship - Most commonly, this will be set to 'No' because rules will tend to be created to avoid accepting the order e.g. if you're restricting the maximum product purchase quantity to 2 per customer and the customer has added 3, you would want to set this as 'No' to block the order being completed as the rules have been exceeded. You would set this as 'Yes' in an instance that you want to apply a basket message when the restriction is hit, but will still allow for the order to be accepted.
Summary
You can now use the Product Restriction area of the Visualsoft Admin! You have gained an understanding of how to create, edit and deactivate restrictions from your store.
Further Reading
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