Category: WooCommerce Tips

Here’s a collection of tips, snippets and articles to answer your biggest WooCommerce customization questions. You can use the search button above to refine your search, or alternatively click on one of these popular WooCommerce customization tags: Checkout page, Single product page, Cart page

You might also want to visualize the WooCommerce “hooks” in case you’re a little more familiar with coding – here’s the link to the popular “Visual Hook Guide Series“, where you can find all the WooCommerce PHP actions in a user-friendly way :)

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WooCommerce: Product Title Shortcode

WordPress shortcodes allow you to save time. For example, on my WooCommerce product pages I found myself typing the product title at least three times: in the product name input field, ok, but also again in the product long description and in a custom product tab inside a text link.

So, while finding ways to save time and reduce errors and typos, I coded the shortcode below so that I could avoid writing the title 3 times (and they’re very long!).

How does it work? Simply use [post_title] in a WooCommerce product, WordPress page, WordPress post or custom post and this will magically turn into the current post title. Simple!

WooCommerce: Hide “Private” Products From The Shop Page

WooCommerce admins and store managers can set the product visibility to “Private“. This is helpful if they need to hide certain products from the public, while keeping them available for manual invoicing or other purposes.

The problem, however, is that if admins or store managers are logged in, private WooCommerce products (as well as private WordPress posts, private WordPress pages, etc.) are actually visible on the Shop, Category and product loop pages.

The “Private: ” prefix is added to the product title (see screenshot), but there is usually no need to alter the frontend with products that are not going to be added to the cart anyway!

So, let’s hide private products for WooCommerce administrators from the frontend. Enjoy!

WooCommerce: Add Hyperlink to Shipping Method Label @ Cart & Checkout

Let’s say you want to help customers understand your shipping rates and benefits right on the WooCommerce Cart and Checkout pages, by adding a link to each shipping option (e.g. “View shipping FAQ“).

As you can see from the first and second screenshot below, if you enter any HTML within the WooCommerce shipping zone -> shipping method settings, this will be stripped out, and HTML tags such as hyperlinks won’t work.

So, how can we add a clickable text link to each shipping method, given that we can’t use the WooCommerce settings? Well, as usual, a quick PHP snippet can help us with that. Enjoy!

WooCommerce: Set Customer Default Tax Location

The WooCommerce settings allow you to define the default customer tax location (“Calculate tax based on” -> “Shop base address“). In this case, when a guest customer enters the checkout, tax will be calculated based on the store address.

The problem is that this option is unusual – businesses require the “Calculate tax based on” -> “Customer billing address” option in most cases.

So, today, we will be setting the default tax location when “Customer billing address” has been chosen AND the customer is either logged out (so, no billing address is set) or logged in but have no saved address (for example, a brand new customer). Enjoy!

WooCommerce: Apply Discount to Cheapest Cart Item

If you run WooCommerce store promotions, this little snippet will help you with that. For example, how to run a “Buy 2 products, get one half off” or a “Buy 3 products, get the cheapest one for free” campaign?

The trick behind this workaround is to find the cheapest item by looping through the cart, and then to set its price so that it’s lower than the regular price. Enjoy!

WooCommerce: “New Order” Email Recipient Based on Billing Country

The amazing thing about WooCommerce is that you can override any setting with a few lines of code. In today’s example we will try to code a solution where the “New Order” WooCommerce email will be delivered to a custom recipient based on the billing country.

This could be helpful when the WooCommerce store is managed by multiple people, and you want to make sure that order notifications only go to the right manager. Enjoy!

WooCommerce: Count Variation Sales (Shortcode)

We’ve already studied how to display the number of sales for a given product ID via a shortcode – however that solution won’t work for a variation ID, because WooCommerce only counts the “parent product” sales.

We need a different workaround in this case. This will require we either query the orders that contain such variation ID, and then calculate the sum – or that we install a snippet on day 0 so that we can count variation sales from that moment onwards, without having to query and calculate anything.

We will study the latter, and then display the result via a shortcode, so that you can use it anywhere, even inside the variation description.

Enjoy!

WooCommerce: Display Long Description Instead Of Short One @ Single Product Page

Especially when you migrate from a different ecommerce platform to WooCommerce, you may end up placing or importing content in the wrong place.

A lot of confusion, for example, arises when a new WooCommerce store owner needs to understand the difference between the “Long” and the “Short” description. Well, the “Long description” is the one that displays inside the “Description” tab, below the product summary (that section that features the image on the left + add to cart on the right), usually in full width. The “Short description“, on the other hand, is the one that shows on the right hand side of the product image, and is usually… shorter.

Now, what if you don’t use the “Short description” in your WooCommerce store, and you wish to display the “Long description” on the right hand side of the featured image instead? Well, here’s a simple snippet for you. Enjoy!

WooCommerce: Hide SubCategory Products On Product Category Pages

You’d think that this was a core WooCommerce setting – it’s not.

In fact, from the WordPress “Customizer“, you can set the product category page display to “Show products” only, “Show subcategories” only, or “Show subcategories and products” (see screenshot below). But these 3 options, in my opinion, could and should do much better.

For example, if you assign a product “ABC” to a parent category “X“, and a product “DEF” to a child category “X->Y“, and if you choose “Show products“, the parent category page will show both “ABC” and “DEF” products, while there should only be 1.

If you select “Show subcategories“, the same page will only have the link to the subcategory, but the product belonging to the parent category, “ABC“, won’t be visible, which doesn’t make sense.

If, even worse, you pick “Show subcategories and products“, the parent category page will display the subcategory link, as well as both products “ABC” and “DEF“, which once again is a bit weird.

Let’s fix this with a simple snippet – enjoy!

WooCommerce: Delete Customer After a Failed (Spam) Order

Once again, I’m trying to find WooCommerce anti-spam workarounds to avoid manual admin work like receiving hundreds of emails, deleting hundreds of fake orders and fake WordPress users.

In today’s “episode” I will try to clean the WordPress User database table after a failed order, because I’m really angry when “17PmU3MmKZS9ZAy7 17PmU3MmKZS9ZAy7” manages to register an account on Business Bloomer after a carding attack!

Please test this snippet on a dev/staging environment and not directly on the live site. Deleting a WordPress user is never a good idea, so you need to make sure everything is working as it should. Enjoy!

WooCommerce: Limit Daily Sales For Cheap Products (Anti-Spam)

We could call this the “WooCommerce Anti-Spam Without a Plugin” series, while I attempt to fight against bad humans and very bad bots who love attacking the Business Bloomer checkout page with spam orders and fake user registrations.

My first attempts were (1) My Account registration anti-spam honeypot, (2) Checkout anti-carding-attack honeypot, and (3) Reducing the number of admin emails, but I can tell that (2) didn’t work, and I got another carding attack on a $9 product last weekend. Bots are smart.

Today, I’d like to share another anti-spam snippet that I’m currently testing on Business Bloomer. Most carding attacks, in fact, end up with the purchase of a single product in the $1-$9 range – which means that limiting the daily sales for specific, inexpensive, products may do the trick.

My code counts the times each product has been purchased during the day – and if a carding attack occurs, the product won’t be purchasable any longer until the end of the day. Because we’re talking about cheap products, it’s no problem for me to disallow legit sales as well for 24 hours. Use at your own risk, of course.

We already covered how to “Limit Sales Of A Product Per Day“, but this time I’d like to apply that to an array of products – and specifically all those that are under $10. Enjoy!

WooCommerce: Checkout Anti-Spam Honeypot

Here’s my second attempt to fight against WooCommerce spam, without installing a captcha plugin. A few posts ago I covered the My Account user registration spam, so today I want to tackle the WooCommerce Checkout, and try to “trick” spam bots.

Of course, this is a workaround and smart bots may understand you’re tricking them. So, feel free to test this first and let me know if it stops spam orders, card testing attacks, and tons of fake user registrations.

Same as the other post, I will be adding a custom hidden checkout field with an empty value. This won’t be visible to the customer, but will be to spam bots, which will try to post a value. My validation code will, however, generate an error if the custom field posts a value, and therefore should prevent most spam bots from going through.

Let me know if it works!

WooCommerce: Disable “Password Changed” Administrator Emails

The “Password Changed” email is – actually – a WordPress core notification. It goes to admins when a WordPress user changes their password, and the email body says something along the lines of “Password changed for user: XYZ“.

So, why are we saying this email notification can be stopped if you run a WooCommerce website? Well, because WooCommerce provides us developers with a handy filter, that we can use for this exact reason.

For what concerns my own experience, I use Sendgrid to deliver Business Bloomer WordPress/WooCommerce emails – and on the free plan I have a limit of 100 daily emails. Which means I needed to find a way to reduce the number of email notifications.

Today we’ll cover the “Password Changed” one – let’s see how to stop administrators from getting them!

WooCommerce: Add to Cart Form @ Shop Page

We’ve already covered a similar customization on Business Bloomer: how to display Ajax quantity selectors on the WooCommerce Shop page. The problem there was that that only works for simple products, and only when Ajax add to cart is activated via the WooCommerce settings.

Today I’d like to experiment a little, and see what happens when we include the “add to cart template” (i.e. the one you see on the WooCommerce Single Product page) under each product on the WooCommerce Shop page.

This *should* work with all product types – especially variable products – because you will see the attribute dropdown selectors in such a case, as if you were on the single product page.

I haven’t tested this with grouped, bundle, and special product types, so feel free to share your findings in the comments below. Enjoy!