Understand User Roles and Capabilities for WooCommerce

User Roles and Capabilities for WooCommerce

Editorial Team December 11, 2018 3 min read

After installation of WooCommerce Plugins you have to know the WordPress user roles and capabilities available in WooCommerce. There are different roles and capabilities assigned to users on your wordpress site/online store. This is to give the site owner control over who can access on the site.

Existing User Roles in WordPress

First, from the WordPress Dashboard, you’ve to go to the navigation bar and click on Users. Then click on Add New.

On the Add New User page, scroll down the page and from the drop down menu click on the Role. WordPress defines default user roles as below:

Administrator – Administrator have the complete access to all administration aspects of the store/site. Admin role will be like, deleting other user’s pages and posts, updating the core, creating and deleting users, etc. Moreover, administrators have the access to add, delete and manage plugins and themes on the site. He will also have the access to modify the details of other users, including passwords and credentials. In multi-sites, you will have an additional user known as Super Admin. This role has all capabilities by default.
Editor – The major role of an Editor is to allow you to get access and editing rights to other users’ posts. Editor is the person who is managing the blogs and other posts on your site. They can edit or delete any posts on your site. In addition, editor can moderate, edit and delete comments on the site as well.
Author – The main role of an Author is to create and publish their own posts. They don’t have access to other people’s posts. They won’t be able to create new categories. But they can use the existing categories of your site and create new tags. They cannot moderate or delete comments on your site, even though they can view them. Similarly, they don’t have access to plugins and themes on your site.
Contributor – In general we know that a contributor is a user who can write and edit posts on your site. But they don’t have access to publish posts. Hence, the post that written by author, an Editor has to review and publish it.
Subscriber – Subscriber role has only read access on your site. Moreover, they can manage their own profiles on the site, like user information and password. Other than that, they have the permission to read only the post and leave comments on your site.

Additional WooCommerce User Roles

After successful installation of WooCommerce, you’ll notice that there are two additional roles added:

Shop Manager – Shop Managers have more capabilities than Customers, but less than Administrators. Shop Managers can read and write the settings that are found in WooCommerce and Product menus – this will allow Shop Manager(s) to add, edit, and delete products, read the reports, configure the settings related to shipping and payments, etc. The shop manager role can be compared to the Editor role in WordPress that we discussed above.
Customer – Customer is closest in functionality to the subscriber role, only having read access to your store. To make purchase from your online store customers can create an account in the WooCommerce store. They will also have the ability to manage their own profile, including functions like creating an account, signing back in to make more purchases, resetting forgotten passwords, changing usernames, etc.