Hidden but active products

[lindapowers]

Hi

I'm talking with Stan and testing something I want to share with developers here.

The concept of hidden products.

I know that both for VM core or for 3rd party extensions there is a need sometimes of creating hidden products that may be added to the cart but you want to hide from the customer in the shop, mainly cause in some cases these would be free (charity, gift products, christmas cards. etc)

For the core I've seen it for tax purposes also and some 3rd party applications require it, I can think of "Bonus product" from Daycounts or the one I'm testing, gift products from Rupostel.


So when you create one of this "free" products you wanna make sure they are not reachable by the customer except at checkout.

I noticed that if you create a product with a category assigned it will appear on "Latest products". Even if the category is hidden the product itself appears.

I tried what Stan recommended which was creating a top level category unpublished and a subcategory publied but still the product is shown in "latest products".


The only way I found of hiding the product was to not assign any category to the product. Still this is reachable by URL.

Noticed also if a category is unpublished a product can't be assigned to that concrete category, you have to publish the category so that it appears in the dropdown.


Maybe I'm not getting the concept correctly of "hidden products" but these have to be published and with stock to be able to get added to the cart.

So maybe here the question is how to safely hide a product from customers but keeping it active so that it can be added at checkout.


VirtueMart 3.0.19.4 Blue Corvus 9440 J! 3.6.5

[AH]

Have you considered assigning them to a shopper group??

[lindapowers]

No I forgot that completely so maybe Im thinking about hidden categories when I should check hidden shopper groups.

Thank you! Gonna check it

[Studio 42]

Hi manu, for a customer i added category filter quantity checking in cart, but it's possible to do similar with a customfield plugin too.
Eg. You add this specific customfield and associate it to a product, category, or shopper group and if the condition is not fulfilled, you disable add to cart.
In your case you wan hide it, but it not prevent adding to cart, but on checking add to cart, you can disable it too on checking a condition using a customfield plugin.
If you need to prevent display product, you can use the same customfield, of course you need to not add category in case you need stock handel.

[Milbo]

I think the easiest way is to add the shopper to another shoppergroup, which can see then the product, which then can be added by whatever

[Studio 42]

Have you considered assigning them to a shopper group??

Max,
I have read AH answer, but it depend your needs. in my case it was not possible to use shopperfield, because this was direct links from an email, so the user have no shopper group assigned.

[Milbo]

It works also, when the shoppergroup switcher supports it

[lindapowers]

Hi guys

Not sure you understood the issue here.

Shopper groups doesn't seem the way to go cause that will hide the product completely not being able to get added to the checkout and the product has to be hidden for all customers at the shop but still active to be added at the cart.

Generally assigning a product to a hidden category would be enough, but now we have views like "latest products" where the product actually appears.

You want to make sure a type of product "hidden" or "free" is really not accesible via URL.

Regards

[Studio 42]

Manu, you can disable display in any list using customfields, but of course in case of latest this substract form total displayed(as related product do when you are out of stock or not fill a condition).