You launched a new feature on your WooCommerce store or added a subscription functionality for your customers but aren’t sure how your customers will take it, if it’ll help them, and wish to review the functionality yourself first?
Or, do you take remote orders over the phone and need a solution that lets you place orders on your WooCommerce store on behalf of your customers?
Well, there’s a solution. Several “Shop As A Customer” plugins are available in the market today for distinct WooCommerce use cases. They help you review your WooCommerce store’s functionalities for optimal performance.
So, in this article, we’ll review the top Shop As A Customer WooCommerce plugins and their main features. But first, let’s see how shopping as a customer can benefit your business.
Benefits Of Shopping As A WooCommerce Customer
“Shop as a customer” plugins enable you, store administrator, to browse your WooCommerce frontend as one of your customers – allowing you to see what your customers see when they access your website.
It means you can test all the functions that work on your customer’s account, product and cart pages, impersonating your customers.
Here are some benefits of this feature and how you can leverage it for your WooCommerce store.
- It’s extremely beneficial if you take phone or in-store orders. You can easily switch to your customer’s profile, add their card details, and place orders on their behalf – making it easier to maintain the order details and customer log in the database and providing high convenience to your customers.
- Whether your customers are facing issues with orders, subscriptions, or memberships – you can easily see what they see on the front end by switching to their accounts and troubleshooting the problems more quickly and effectively.
- Besides, the plugin makes it easier to analyze your store’s new functionalities, whether they’re intuitive for the customers, and what you can improve further to offer maximum convenience.
- Lastly, the plugin’s easy-to-use and straightforward, removing the risks of failure, especially for eCommerce store owners with no prior coding expertise. You can easily switch to your admin account from the customer account with a single click.
So, if you want to leverage this functionality and take customer orders over the phone – let’s look at some of the best Shop as a Customer plugins for your WooCommerce website.
Shop As A Customer Plugins For WooCommerce
WooCommerce – Shop as a Customer for WooCommerce
The Shop as a Customer for WooCommerce plugin lets you visit your WooCommerce store’s frontend as a customer and place orders on behalf of offline customers who cannot shop independently.
You can collect customer orders via emails or phone calls and place orders on their behalf – making it easier for less tech-savvy customers to avail of your products and services and shop in your store. It helps improve overall store conversions and ensures customer satisfaction for every customer.
Besides, you can also keep track and record the orders you make via these channels, including phone and email. If you ever need to find particular customers, you can search their email or name with the plugin. Switching back from the customer to the administrative mode is a breeze with a single click – clicking on the ‘Switch Back’ button on the top bar.
Other features include enabling the offline payment method option to place orders for customers and allocating specific user roles, like administrator, editor, author, subscriber, contributor, and shop manager – allowing specific users to log in and shop on your store on behalf of your customers.
Top feature: The plugin lets you easily view and export your customer logins’ history in the log. In addition, you can also contact specific customers via WhatsApp right away from the log.
Pricing: $49.00 (billed annually)
WooCommerce – User Switching for WooCommerce
Like the previous plugin, User Switching for WooCommerce allows you, as a store manager or an admin, to switch between user accounts and login and place orders on behalf of your valuable customers.
Using this user switcher plugin – you can create an order, add products to the cart, or even manually invoice the customers through a separate invoicing system.
This plugin is unique because it allows only those users to switch between accounts that can edit other users. Thus, it lets users only switch to other user accounts with similar or lower capabilities – ensuring higher security.
Its WordPress nonce security system ensures that only users with the user account switching capabilities can execute the user switching functionalities in the plugin.
You can easily switch back to your admin account by clicking on the logout link at the top-left corner of your screen.
Top feature: It uses the WordPress cookie authentication system when switching between the customer and administrator accounts.
Pricing: $49.00 (billed annually)
WooCommerce – Login & Shop as Customer
The Login and Shop as Customer plugin make troubleshooting the issues customers face easy – allowing you to access your store’s front end as one of your customers.
Besides placing orders for customers – this plugin also allows you to review custom variables like the product fields and the customer-specific pricing, which you cannot view from the backend as an admin. In addition, once you log in as a customer – the plugin automatically loads the customer’s billing and shipping details on the checkout pages from the customer’s accounts.
Moreover, unlike other Shop as a Customer plugins – you can also see the customer’s My Account page and make relevant changes from the front end. Additionally, you can also customize the switch-back-to-admin button’s text as needed.
Top feature: This plugin records the complete history of the admin login – allowing you to identify who logged in as a customer and using which admin account while capturing the timestamp. You can also easily disable or enable the admin login history log feature per your business needs.
Pricing: $39.00 (billed annually)
Codecanyon – WooCommerce Shop As Customer
WooCommerce Shop as Customer allows shop managers and administrators to switch to the customer or user accounts and leverage specific functionalities per their assigned roles.
For instance, as a shop manager or an administrator, you can easily create manual orders on behalf of your customers through their accounts. Besides, you can also create and send invoices to your customers using this plugin.
It also lets you set the minimum user role to control who can access the plugin from the settings page and switch to your customer’s accounts.
When you wish to search the customer’s name, you can click on the “Shop as Customer” button at the backend of the plugin. A modal appears on the screen to search the customer’s name and switch to their accounts.
You can also switch to the user or customer accounts from the WordPress admin dashboard’s Users screen. Simply hover the mouse on any customer, and click on the link saying “Switch to” to switch to their accounts.
Top feature: It lets you switch to the customers using the recently used feature. When the modal search appears, it displays the recently used customer’s name – making it easier to select and switch to their accounts without typing their names in the search bar.
Pricing: The Regular License costs $29, whereas the Extended License costs $149.
WordPress – User Switching
Using this plugin, you can switch between a customer and an administrator account in a single click. When you switch accounts, this plugin also helps you instantly log out and log in as the desired user.
This seamless switching is an excellent feature for testing environments and assisting customers with problems if any. By default, the plugin comes with an “only administrators” feature for single-site installations and a “Super Admins” feature for multi-site installations.
Another important security feature is that it doesn’t reveal the customer account’s password by any means. In addition, it remembers the customer accounts you switch to using the cookie authentication system in WordPress.
Besides, it offers full support for SSL administration and user session validation.
Top feature: This plugin is highly compatible with WooCommerce, BuddyPress, bbPress, Multisite, and two-factor authentication plugins.
Pricing: Free
WordPress – Shop as Client for WooCommerce
This plugin facilitates accessing and managing the frontend while leveraging the frontend functionalities to place new orders for new or existing customers – beneficial if you take email or phone orders.
It matches the customer’s billing email to assign the registered customer’s orders automatically. At the same time, if it doesn’t find any suitable match, it lets you choose between creating a new user or customer or placing the order as a guest user.
While this is a free plugin, you can also opt for its paid add-ons to avail of more features – like automatically filling in the checkout details. Adding a fake payment gateway to place the orders on customers’ behalf, prioritized support, and continued development.
Top feature: The plugin’s pro version lets you add custom fields.
Pricing: Free, and the pro version comes in four plans, including Single, Dual, Business, and Developer. which cost $50.43, $81.31, $153.36, and $256.28 per year, respectively.
Conclusion
Switching to your customer’s accounts and shopping as a customer offers several eCommerce benefits – such as seamlessly taking phone orders, testing and reviewing new functionalities, assisting customers with their account queries, and maintaining customer order details.
So, if you need this functionality for your WooCommerce store to take more customer orders and increase conversions, then check out the plugins mentioned above and choose a suitable solution that best fits your needs.
