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How to Restrict Account Sections in Shopify

Show or hide sections of Shopify New Customer Accounts by market, tag, metafield or B2B status, with admin steps, limits and what hiding does not protect.

12 min read

You can restrict sections of New Customer Accounts in two ways: by choosing which blocks appear in the checkout and accounts editor, and by adding rules that decide which customers see a given block. The editor handles placement and market-level visibility. Per-customer rules (by tag, metafield, B2B status or account age) need an app that supports conditional rendering, such as AccountCraft. This guide walks through both, then covers the part most tutorials skip: what hiding a section does and does not protect.

AccountCraft
Show the Right Account Sections
AccountCraft adds customer-based visibility rules to Shopify account blocks, including rules for tags, metafields, market, B2B status, and account age.
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TL;DR

  • Account pages in New Customer Accounts are edited in Settings > Checkout, not in your theme, so Liquid snippets from older tutorials do not apply to them.
  • The editor lets you add, reorder and hide blocks, and show or hide blocks per market.
  • For rules based on the individual customer, use an app with conditional visibility. AccountCraft supports customer tag, metafield, market, B2B and account age.
  • Hiding a block changes what a customer sees. It is not a security control for data, so keep sensitive data out of blocks that anyone can reach.

Table of Contents

Why the top search results won’t help with account pages

Search for this topic and you will find advice about restricting a whole store, hiding products from guests, or wrapping a theme page in a Liquid check for a logged-in customer. Those methods apply to your storefront theme. They are useful, but they answer a different question.

New Customer Accounts are not rendered by your theme. Shopify’s own documentation says the checkout and accounts editor lets you customize your checkout, order status, thank you page and customer accounts pages in a place separate from your theme editor. So the question “how do I restrict a section of the account area?” has to be answered inside that editor and its extension system.

A note on terminology. New Customer Accounts is Shopify’s current account system. Legacy customer accounts are the older theme-based pages that merchants are migrating away from, and the Shopify upgrade documentation is the place to check what changes in that move. Everything below assumes you are on New Customer Accounts or planning to be.

Why the top search results won't help with account pages — overview diagram

What “restricting a section” can mean

Before you open the editor, decide which of these you actually need. They use different tools.

Goal Example Where it lives
Remove a block for everyone Hide a block you don’t want on the Profile page Checkout and accounts editor
Show a block only in some regions A consent block for EU markets only Editor, market-specific overrides
Show a block only to some customers Wholesale tools for tagged customers only App with conditional rendering
Show a block only after authentication Hide sensitive details from tokenized-link viewers Extension using the Authentication State API
Keep non-members off store pages Wholesale-only catalog Store access settings or login-wall apps, not the account editor

The first two need no app. The third and fourth need an extension. The last is a storefront job, covered near the end.

Step by step: hide or reorder blocks in the editor

The account pages you can edit are Orders, Profile and Sign-in. Here is the path.

  1. In your Shopify admin, go to Settings > Checkout.
  2. Under Configurations, click Edit on the configuration you want to change. Shopify allows you to customize both active and draft configurations, so use a draft when you want to experiment.
  3. Use the page selector at the top of the editor to switch to Customer accounts, then choose Orders or Profile.
  4. In the left sidebar, select a block. From there you can move it, hide it or duplicate it, and the preview updates beside it.
  5. Save when the preview looks right.

The editor’s preview-first workflow is the main reason to prefer it over code. You see the result of each change before a customer does.

Limits to know before you plan a layout

App-based blocks are capped. Shopify’s documentation on checkout and accounts apps notes a maximum of three app-based extensions per designated area on account pages. If you plan to stack several apps on the Profile page, check that cap early. One app that provides several blocks through a single extension is easier to fit than three separate apps.

Restrict by market

If your store sells in several regions, the most common restriction is regional. A consent or privacy block that matters in one market may be noise in another.

The editor supports this directly: according to Shopify’s page on customizing customer accounts, market-specific overrides let you tailor account experiences by showing or hiding specific blocks in different regions. Set up your markets first, then switch the editor to the market you want to adjust and hide the blocks that do not belong there.

Three steps for market-specific account blocks

Keep the logic simple. If you find yourself building five variants of the Profile page, you are probably trying to do per-customer targeting with a per-market tool. That is where conditional rendering comes in.

Restrict by customer: tags, metafields, B2B and account age

The editor on its own treats every customer in a market the same way. Many merchants want something sharper:

  • A wholesale pricing card that only tagged wholesale customers see.
  • A loyalty banner that appears only for customers whose account is older than a set age.
  • A pet or vehicle record list that appears only when a customer has opted into a program stored in a metafield.
  • A B2B ordering block shown to B2B customers and hidden from regular shoppers.

This is the gap AccountCraft fills. It is a visual block builder for New Customer Accounts, built on Shopify’s official Customer Account UI Extensions, so there is no code and no theme change. Each block can be given visibility rules. The conditions available are:

  • customer tag
  • customer metafield
  • market
  • B2B status
  • account age

A practical setup for a wholesale program looks like this:

  1. Tag approved wholesale customers in Customers in your admin (for example wholesale).
  2. Install AccountCraft and open its Block Builder.
  3. Add a card block with your wholesale terms and ordering instructions.
  4. Set the block’s visibility condition to customers with the wholesale tag.
  5. Open the account page in the preview and check it with a tagged test customer and an untagged one.

The same pattern works with metafields. If you store a value such as a membership level on the customer, use it as the condition and change the metafield to change what the customer sees. If you want a primer on creating those fields, our guide to custom fields in Shopify accounts covers the setup.

For wholesale stores specifically, see how we approach GDPR-ready B2B customer accounts.

Testing placement without publishing

If you or a developer are working with extension blocks, you can test where a block lands without saving to the live store. Shopify’s developer docs describe using a query parameter such as ?placement-reference=PROFILE1 in the preview URL to force a block into a different slot. That is a quick way to check ordering constraints when several blocks compete for space.

Hiding is not securing

This is the caution that matters most. A block that is hidden from a customer is a presentation decision. It tells you what the page shows. It does not decide who is allowed to retrieve the underlying data.

Two habits keep you safe:

  • Don’t put confidential information into a block just because you can hide it. If a piece of information would harm a customer or your business in the wrong hands, it does not belong in a customer-facing account block at all. Contract terms, internal notes and cost prices are examples.
  • Remember who sees the page. Customers can reach account pages through a full sign-in, and in some cases through a tokenized link. Shopify’s developer documentation for the Authentication State API explains that an extension can render content conditionally based on whether the buyer is fully signed in or viewing through a tokenized link. If you are building a custom extension, use it to keep sensitive details behind full authentication.

With AccountCraft, customer data stays in Shopify and there is no separate customer database, which means the rules you set control display of data that Shopify already holds under its own permissions. That simplifies the picture, but it does not remove your responsibility to decide what data you show customers in the first place.

Restricting pages outside the account area

You may have landed here wanting something else: a members-only page, a hidden collection or a wholesale-only storefront. Those are storefront restrictions, and they work differently.

For B2B, Shopify’s help center says that by default a B2B store is publicly accessible, and only logged-in B2B customers can see B2B pricing, B2B-only products and B2B-exclusive content. It also notes that if you need a full login-wall experience, you might need a third-party app or custom Liquid development. That is a store-level decision, and the account editor is not the right place to solve it.

For everything else, such as hiding products from guests, you are in theme and app territory. If your concern is broader store protection, a roundup of security plugins for Shopify stores is a reasonable starting point for comparing options.

A frequent reason to show or hide account blocks is consent. A few points keep this practical.

Shopify’s GDPR guidance points merchants to Settings > Customer privacy for the privacy policy, cookie banner and data sales opt-out page, and notes that compliance remains the merchant’s responsibility. The Customer Privacy API is how consent choices get recorded and honored.

AccountCraft includes a privacy consent block and an SMS consent block, and they work with Shopify’s customer privacy APIs to help collect, record and honor customer consent choices. Showing them only in the markets where you want to collect that consent is a normal use of market visibility. Whether a given setup meets the law in your regions is for you and your legal adviser to decide, not something an app can settle.

For a deeper walk-through, read our posts on adding account consent without code and the four admin steps for CCPA.

One more point from Shopify’s privacy settings documentation: privacy work is mostly about the cookie banner and opt-out mechanisms working correctly together, and not merely about covering up page sections. Hiding a consent block does not substitute for any of that.

Where AccountCraft fits

If you want account pages that respond to who the customer is, AccountCraft is built for that. Its Block Builder offers 14 block types: text, banner, button, card, update form, single field, record list, SMS consent, privacy consent, wishlist, image, video, spacer and divider. Fields bind to customer metafields, record lists handle repeatable data such as pets or vehicles, and translations cover multilingual stores. It uses only official Shopify extensions, and nothing needs changing in your theme.

There is a free plan. The paid plans, Pro and Plus, are billed through Shopify, and the Shopify App Store listing has the current pricing.

Install AccountCraft free from the Shopify App Store, or look at the plans on our site.

Our perspective: restrict by relevance, not by fear

We build account pages for a living, and the pattern we see most often is merchants trying to hide things when they should be deciding what to show. An account page that shows every customer every block is cluttered. An account page that shows each customer only what applies to them is easier to use, and customers are more likely to return to it and keep their details current.

So we treat visibility rules as a relevance tool first. Show the wholesale card to wholesale customers, show the regional consent block in the region where you collect that consent, and show the pet record list to customers who have pets. Security, by contrast, belongs in Shopify’s permissions, in what data you choose to expose, and in a proper login for anything that is truly private.

The second thing we hold to is keeping data where it already lives. Fields tied to customer metafields, with no second database, mean the rule you set on screen and the data in your admin never drift apart.

— Ivan Signorile

Quick checklist before you publish

  • You are on New Customer Accounts, not legacy customer accounts.
  • You used a draft configuration for experiments.
  • Every conditional block was previewed with a customer who should see it and one who should not.
  • Market overrides are set only where the regions really differ.
  • No confidential data sits in a block that relies on hiding alone.
  • App blocks stay within the three-extension limit per area.
  • Consent blocks match what your privacy settings and cookie banner actually do.

FAQ

Can I restrict account sections with Liquid in my theme?

No, not for New Customer Accounts. Those pages are edited in the checkout and accounts editor, separate from your theme. Liquid-based restrictions still work for storefront pages such as collections or custom pages.

Can I show a block only to wholesale or B2B customers?

Yes. Tag the customers, or use B2B status, and apply a visibility condition to the block with an app that supports conditional rendering. AccountCraft supports conditions by customer tag, metafield, market, B2B and account age. Test with one customer who matches and one who does not.

Does hiding a block protect the data in it?

No. Hiding controls what a customer sees on the page, and it is not an access control. Keep confidential information out of customer-facing blocks, and use full authentication for anything sensitive.

Can I hide blocks for only some countries?

Yes. The editor supports market-specific overrides, so you can show or hide blocks per market. For finer rules inside a market, such as by tag, you need an app with conditional visibility.

Will this make my store GDPR compliant?

No app can do that for you. Consent blocks help collect, record and honor customer choices through Shopify’s customer privacy APIs, but compliance stays your responsibility. Talk to a qualified legal adviser about your specific obligations.

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