(Coming soon, in release MS-0288, scheduled for late October 2026)
You can now choose who sees an eCommerce store or a product category on your website. Limit it to users in certain groups, to users in a certain type of organisation, or hide it from one type of organisation. Everyone else won't see it in menus, lists or search, can't open its pages, and can't buy its products.
Why you'd use it
One website often serves several audiences. Dealers might have a store of co-branded marketing material that end customers shouldn't see. A category of premium rewards might be only for your top tier. Until now, the only option was the category's Hidden setting, which hides it from everyone. Now you can set exactly who can see each store and category.
The rules work the same way as promotion eligibility, so they'll feel familiar if you've set up a promotion.
Limit who can see a store
Go to eCommerce Stores, open the store and click the new Visibility tab.
Changes are saved as soon as you make them. When you remove a group, you're asked to confirm, and the confirmation tells you who will be able to see the store afterwards. That matters most when you remove the last rule, because then everyone can see it.
Limit who can see a category
Go to Product Categories and open the category. The Who can see this category panel is at the bottom of the Details tab, and works the same way as the store's Visibility tab.
A category's rules also apply to:
- Its subcategories. If a category is restricted, so is everything below it. A subcategory's panel tells you when a parent category is restricted, and you can add further rules to the subcategory.
- Its products. A product is hidden if any of its categories is hidden from the user, even if it's also in categories they can see. So putting a product in a restricted category is enough to keep it from everyone outside that category's audience.
How the rules work
| Setting | Who can see the store or category |
|---|---|
| Nothing set | Everyone. This is how every existing store and category stays, until you add a rule. |
| Groups, match Any group | Users in at least one of the groups. |
| Groups, match All groups | Users in every one of the groups. |
| Include only | Users who belong to an organisation of that type. |
| Exclude | Everyone except users who belong to an organisation of that type. An excluded type always wins, even if the user is in one of the groups. |
When you set groups and organisation types together, a user has to pass all of them. In the store example above, a user has to be in Sales or Sales Manager, and not in a Dealer Network organisation.
A few details:
- Adding the Public group lets anyone in, including visitors who aren't logged in.
- Organisation types are checked against the organisations the user is a member of. Membership of your account's top-level organisation doesn't count, because everyone is in it.
- You can't include and exclude the same organisation type.
- If a group or organisation type used in the rules is deleted, it's shown as (deleted) so you can remove it. If that leaves nobody able to see the store or category, the summary says Visible to: nobody and explains why.
What users outside the audience see
For anyone who doesn't pass the rules, the store or category simply isn't there:
- The store isn't in the website menu.
- The category isn't in category lists or in components that show categories, and its products aren't in product lists, search results, search suggestions or recently viewed products.
- The store, category and product pages show page not found if the user goes to them directly, so they don't learn the page exists.
Buying is blocked too
Users can't add a hidden product to their cart. If a product was already in someone's cart before its category was restricted, they can't check out until they remove it, and the error tells them which product it is.
The same check applies to points checkout, monetary redemption, and purchases made through the shopping assistant.
Using Kademi Copilot
The updateStore and updateCategory tools can set the same rules, so you can ask Copilot something like "make the Dealer Resources store visible only to the Dealers group". The tools can add and remove groups, set any or all matching, and set or clear the included and excluded organisation types. Their results include the current rules, so you can also ask who can see a store or category.
Things to know
- Existing stores and categories are unchanged. With no rules set, everyone can see them, as before.
- Configuration snapshots include a store's rules. A store's visibility is copied along with its other settings when you move configuration between accounts.
- Not covered yet: brands, and the most popular products component. These still show for everyone.