Top 7 Free WooCommerce Catalog Mode Plugins to Professionalize your Store

Published in

LearnWoo

9 min readOct 31, 2017

Before getting into this article, I want to ask you a few questions just to make sure that you actually need a WooCommerce Catalog mode plugin.

Do you…

Sell across different kinds of customers and are required to make your store appear different to different customers?
Need to create a wholesale store?
Want to offer different prices to different customers?
Not want to let all of your customers to buy your products?
Want unregistered users to have a different experience from the registered users?
Want your customers to go through some steps before being able to purchase the products?

If your answer to any of the above questions is ‘yes’, then please help yourself with a list and detailed descriptions of the top WooCommerce Catalog mode plugins.

1. WooCommerce Catalog Mode, Wholesale & Role Based Pricing

This is one of those few premium plugins which is complete with every required feature. It is indeed surprising to find all these premium-like features for free. This plugin would meet all your needs, provided you are dealing with only simple products. The premium version has support for other product types. The plugin offers the following features:

WooCommerce Catalog Mode

You can easily turn your entire store into a catalog or can choose to do it only for specific users. There’re advanced options where you can select the desired user roles and hide product prices or “Add to Cart” button for them. Further you can also replace the “Add to Cart” button with another text, which can even be an URL redirecting to another page. You can choose to replace the prices with an “enquiry form” etc.

This feature comes into use when you are updating your stock, contemplating on changing the product prices, or if there’s some kind of maintenance issue. At such times, the catalog mode feature would prevent your store from creating any negative impact on the site visitors and losing potential customers.

WooCommerce Role Based Pricing

This plugin enables you to create new user roles. Every user role created would have the right of a “Customer” user role. At times, due to a number of reasons, you might need to sell your products at different prices to different customers. That’s when you can segregate them based on user roles, and can configure different discounts/markups for them. It is a common practice to give special discounts to loyal customers. Further, selling at different prices to Retailers and Wholesale buyers makes sense.

WooCommerce Wholesale Pricing

This plugin can help you create a complete Wholesale system. Using the role based pricing feature, you can easily create separate discounts and offers for Wholesale buyers. You can even choose to set the price adjustment globally or at the product level.
Product price based on User role: Along with discounts and markups, there’s also an option to give fixed price to products based on user role(s). This feature is included at individual product level.

Role Based Tax Options

Each user role can be assigned a desired tax class and tax display options. You can also set a price suffix text — either a general one or role specific.
Prioritize User roles: Sometimes need arises to assign more than one user roles to some users. The plugin comes with a “drag & drop” feature, which would enable you to select the priority of the user roles.

Create custom user roles

WordPress comes with five user roles and WooCommerce adds “Customer” and “Shopkeeper” user roles. But, you might need some other user roles like “Wholesale Customers”, “Retailers” etc. This plugin would allow you to add new user roles. If you want to know more about WooCommerce user roles, read an article here.
These roles might not be available to other WordPress functionalities or plugins. But, Dynamic Pricing and Discounts plugin for WooCommerce can extend this plugin’s functionalities by identifying the user roles created by this plugin.

Extra features in Premium version for this WooCommerce Catalog Mode plugin

Support for Simple, Variable and Grouped Products.
Option to Discount/Markup on either regular or sale price.
At product level, the individual products can be hidden for all or for specific users.

2. YITH WooCommerce Catalog Mode

The free version of this plugin has fairly limited options when compared to its counterparts. But, YITH is known for its quality products and thus, even though there’re limited features, it doesn’t stop it’s 20,000+ active users to move to other options.
The reason why this plugin still continues to attract users is its add-ons feature, which curbs away the limitations of the plugin. One relevant free add-on we shall discuss later in this article.

Available features in this WooCommerce Catalog mode plugin:

Catalog mode can be either enabled or disabled from the settings page.
For Administrators role, you can choose to have a different setting. Like even if the shop is set to Catalog mode, the admin can be allowed to view a full-fledged store.
From the WooCommerce product details page, the “Add too Cart” button can be hidden.
You can also choose to hide the “Add to Cart” button from the shop page.
Further, “Cart” and “Checkout” pages can be hidden along with all the references to it.

The premium version is feature rich

Some of the prominent features of the premium version are:

The plugin promises a fine-tuned integration with Contact Form 7, Gravity Form, YIT Contact Form. Thus, using any of these plugins, an inquiry form can be added in the product page.
The buttons can be linked to either of the following actions — email address, generic URL, Skype contact or phone number)
The “Review” tab in the product page can be disabled either for all users or only for unregistered users.
You can have an “Exclusion list” which is managed from “Exclusion” tab. Any product added to the exclusion list would not be applied the catalog mode.

3. WooCommerce Catalog Enquiry

This is another great plugin. Its main feature of distinction is its enquiry form, as the name suggests. This plugin is the right choice if you want to have both shop and catalog mode simultaneously. Here is a list of features included in this plugin:

“Add to Cart” button can be hidden from either the product page or any other pages like shop, catalog etc.
Product prices can be hidden from either all users or only the guest users.
Some products can be excluded from Catalog mode based on their categories.
Selling of products can be restricted at the product level. Restricted products will come under the catalog mode.
Admin can choose the users who would see the store in catalog mode.
Custom button or link can be added to either individual products or all the products in the shop.
Catalog mode can be applied based on user groups instead of user roles.
Choose the group you want to apply catalog settings (registered, non-registered users).
The product inquiry form is quite responsive.
The inquiry form fields are customizable.
Labels for form headers and fields can be changed.
The inquire form supports Captcha.
The inquiry button too is customizable.

Pro-version has distinguishable features

There’s an Inquiry dashboard for the Admin, which will contain a list of all the inquiries and Admin may choose to take the necessary actions when required.
A number of options for email templates to choose from.
Customers can choose to inquire about more than one products.
Thus, download this plugin today if you your prime requirement an inquiry form for a catalog mode.

4. YITH WooCommerce Request A Quote

This is the plugin which I had mentioned while introducing the YITH Catalog mode plugin. The features of this plugin are kind of in line with the Woocommerce Catalog Inquire plugin. Just like the above plugin, the features are –

Insert the request form in any page of your site
Receive an email for each request sent by user
Override email template created by the plugin
Users can select one or more products and send the quote request from a specific form available on the site

The premium version offers a great deal of flexibility

Some of the features are like:

An option to restrict unlogged users from requesting quote.
Options of including other form plugin rather than the default one.
Email pdf creation automation.
Give options to the customers of either accepting or rejecting after their inquire has been answered.
Thus, using this plugin alongside the YITH Catalog mode plugin can serve as a good functionality extension.

5. Woocommerce Catalog

This was a great plugin. But, unfortunately, it hasn’t been updated for a year now. So, you can’t expect any support for this. And, support is the single most important thing.
However, the features of this plugin are as follows:

Catalog mode can be achieved with a simple click.
“Add to Cart” button can be replaced with custom buttons.
Buttons are customizable.
Prices of the products can be hidden.
Catalog mode can be restricted to certain categories.
You can choose to restrict the Catalog mode to certain user groups (registered, no registered users).

6. Pricing Deals for WooCommerce

This is another complete plugin. Powered by all the dynamic pricing and discounts features, it can easily create a wholesale store for you. Here’s a list of features:

Bulk Discounts: Give discounts based on the quantity of the of purchase.
Buy One and Get One Deals: A commonly used strategy to increase sales.
You can choose whether the discount would be applied in the presence of a WooCommerc coupon or not.
Catalog Pricing: You can show discounts in the catalog pricing display.
Marketing: This is a very interesting feature which you won’t usually find in other such plugins. With the help of a shortcode, you can display the offer message to the customers.
You can choose to decide how the cart discount would appear, either a unit price or as a WooCommerce Coupon automatically inserted.

Some premium features

Visibility and Salability control for Retail and Wholesale products.
Just like WooCommerce coupons, you can restrict the usage of the discounts to the number of customers.
A text message can be displayed by the side of all Catalog discounts.

7. Catalog for Woocommerce

This plugin can be rightly called a neat one.
It has all the features usually expected from a Catalog mode plugin.

“Add to Cart” button and Prices can be hidden from either the product details page or the shop page.
Ratings and Reviews can be hidden from either the product page or the shop page.
A customized button can be added to replace the “Add to Cart” button and giving a link to it.
The customized button can be stylized.

You can expect the following from the premium version:

Option to add Inquire form in the product page.
Catalog mode can be restricted based on Category, Products and Users.
Shortcodes can be added to popups when clicked on custom button.
Contact Form 7 shortcodes are supported.

Conclusion

That’s all. Hope the above list might help you in deciding the right Catalog mode plugin. As the description suggests, most of these plugins have their own set of pros and cons. Thus, in some cases you might require a combination of these in order to get your work done and at other times, either of these would suffice.
Do, leave a comment if you find this article useful or else let us know if it requires some improvement.

Originally published at learnwoo.com on October 31, 2017.