Hiding an entire category

[Nick H]

Sorry if thus has been discussed elsewhere or if its a very obvious answer, but I can't find it here.
My client wants to be able to restrict the ability of a signed-in customer to only be able to see and therefore order, a range of 'head office approved' list . . . any suggestions please.
I can see that we can hide a specific product, but not where we can restrict all the products apart from the approved list from a viewer.
Client has over over 8,000 products so he'd rather not have to go through all of them!

[leehack]

Create an approved list of products using duplicates and let them only see that.

[Nick H]

Ummm, right. Thanks Lee.
So if I duplicate the products into a new category for 'ABC Industries approved list', how do I make sure that ABC Industries can only see that category?

[TraceyG]

Hi,

This knowledgebase article may help.

[Nick H]

Thanks TraceyG. I've used that bit of the knowledge base to set up customer-specific product areas successfully, but this problem is almost the reverse of that described.
My client has a large corporate customer with many branch locations. The desire is for each of these branch locations to be able to log on and order only from an approved list of products. Head Office does not want the branches to oder anything that is not on the approved list, so we have to restrict the branches view of everything else. How can I do this?
It's unusual in that most on-line shops want visitors to see all their goods; this client wants the opposite!

[leehack]

Can you not just reverse engineer what you have done? If you have the idea working well but the wrong way round, i'd have thought it could be reversed. Maybe that's a simplistic view, never tried it, but if possible one way, can't see why it isn't the other.