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Unlocking WooCommerce’s Full Potential: Addressing Its Weaknesses

Greetings from a seasoned WooCommerce user, developer, and advocate with over 12 years of experience!

I “play” with WooCommerce daily and believe there’s room for improvement. Simply catching up with competitors isn’t the right goal—STANDING OUT (yes, in all caps) is what we should be aiming for.

When you’re focused solely on closing the gap, you risk being seen as “the alternative to” rather than a standout in your own right. WooCommerce, with its unique ecosystem and flexibility, has the potential to thrive by embracing its strengths instead of chasing a moving target. By stepping away from the “catching up” mindset, you can create a truly exceptional product—one that isn’t just comparable but incomparable, one that leads rather than follows.

So, let’s take a step back.

I believe ecommerce software should let you sell ANYTHING (products) to ANYONE (customers around the world), while getting PAID and being able to DELIVER the package asap.

If Woo can address all that, it can really become outstanding, a piece of software that is worth talking about, and that doesn’t need to be compared to others. Because it’s unique.

There’s a reason why you can’t compare pears to apples—yet you could argue that diamonds outshine gold.

So, here’s an overview of key areas where WooCommerce might have weaknesses compared to other ecommerce platforms, together with some context.

WooCommerce: View Customer Order History on Single Order Admin Page

Viewing the WooCommerce customer’s order history directly on the single order admin page can be incredibly useful when you need quick access to a customer’s past purchases without navigating away from the current order screen.

With a simple PHP snippet, you can add this functionality, enabling you to view previous orders and better understand customer behavior in real time.

This customization not only enhances your workflow but also improves customer service, allowing you to address inquiries more efficiently.

Below, I’ll walk through the steps needed to implement this feature, providing you with the PHP code necessary to display order history details on the order admin page itself.

As always, remember to test customizations in a staging environment to ensure compatibility with your setup!

WooCommerce: Get Customer ID From An Email Address

Customizing your WooCommerce store via PHP can involve a variety of tasks, from personalizing orders to managing customer interactions. Often, you might need to find a specific customer’s information, but all you have is their email address.

For example, on this same website, I have custom contact forms that give me a name and an email address upon submit. What if I need to check if the email address is an existing WooCommerce customer who has placed some orders?

Well, the PHP below will give you a quick way to “calculate” the customer ID if you only have an email address. It’s then easy to use the result in a custom calculation or core function, such as wc_get_orders().

Enjoy!

WooCommerce: Add Content To “New Account” Welcome Email

First impressions matter, especially in ecommerce. When a customer creates an account on your WooCommerce store, the “Your {site_title} account has been created!” welcome email is your golden opportunity to solidify a positive connection.

However, the standard WooCommerce email might fall short:

Hi Rodolfo,

Thanks for creating an account on {site_title}. Your username is ____. You can access your account area to view orders, change your password, and more at: ___

Click here to set your new password.

This tutorial teaches you how to display additional content in the “welcome” email. You can then personalize greetings, showcase your brand story, and strategically introduce features like exclusive offers or product recommendations. By tailoring these emails, you’ll not only provide valuable information but also nurture customer loyalty and encourage them to explore your offerings further.

Enjoy!

WooCommerce: Edit User Field @ My Account

Each WordPress user comes with a set of pre-defined fields. These fields store essential information about each user, including the username, name, email, role, website URL, bio, etc.

User fields can be edited in two ways: by the admin, who has access to all user profiles and can edit any user data, including both default and custom fields; and by logged-in users, who can edit their own profile information.

WooCommerce users (customers) can also edit some user data from the My Account page: name, email and password (Account details tab); and also billing and shipping addresses (Addresses tab).

But what if we want to let customers set/edit their bio or their website URL, which are only editable from the WordPress edit profile page? Well, the snippet below will help you display and save data for a default user field, under the Account details tab of the My Account page. Enjoy!

WooCommerce: Populate Billing & Shipping When Adding A New User @ WP Dashboard

If you do a lot of manual work such as creating WordPress users for a B2B WooCommerce site (because they can only shop if they have an account, and you’ve disabled registration on the frontend), you may want to populate some Billing and Shipping fields so that you can save some time.

For example, imagine if all customers are based in Florida, USA; you could automatically populate their billing country, billing state, shipping country and shipping state!

So, let’s see how to approach this. Enjoy!

WooCommerce: Get Customer Second Last Order

There is a native, handy way to get a WooCommerce customer’s last order: wc_get_customer_last_order( $customer_id )

This time, I want to write some custom code to get the second last order instead. We will indeed reuse most of the above function code and change it slightly. Enjoy!

WooCommerce: Change Address Format For a Specific Country

We’ve already covered a little about address formats when we added a custom House Number field to the WooCommerce Checkout page.

Address formats define the way Billing and Shipping addresses are formatted for the end user. Addresses show on the order received / thank you page, on transactional emails and on some My Account pages, and look like this:

{name}\n{company}\n{address_1}\n{address_2}\n{city}\n{state}\n{postcode}\n{country}

Now, what if you wanted to move the “company” before the customer name, or maybe have “address 1” and “address 2” on the same line, or move “postcode” to the last line? Well, thankfully there is a neat WooCommerce filter called “woocommerce_localisation_address_formats” that allows us to do just that – reformat any address for any country we wish. Enjoy!

WooCommerce: Get Current User Orders By Status

This is a neat custom function that you can use in your WooCommerce customization. It can be helpful to know the list of orders placed by the current user ID, for example, if they are in their “My Account” page and you have a custom tab where you want to show e.g. only failed orders. Sooner or later this is something you’ll need. Enjoy!

WooCommerce: Get List Of All Customers

Today’s snippet is a helpful shortcut for getting the list of customers in your WooCommerce website. This may be necessary during customization, especially if you need tailor-made features for administrators and shop managers in the backend or frontend.

How did I find out about the solution below? Well, our job is mainly copy/paste from online forums or read thoroughly the WooCommerce core files on a daily basis – so it must’ve been one of the two. Enjoy!

WooCommerce: Add Column to “Users” Admin Table

On the admin side, you might need to display WooCommerce information inside the users table (WordPress Dashboard > Users). For example, their billing country. Or their phone number. Or maybe some custom calculation e.g. the number of completed orders.

Either way, this is super easy. First, we add a new column – second, we tell what content should go inside it. Enjoy!

Well, this is very easy: first, we add a custom checkout field; then, we make sure that when the checkout is processed we save that field correctly.

Enjoy!

Tag: Customer

Unlocking WooCommerce’s Full Potential: Addressing Its Weaknesses

WooCommerce: View Customer Order History on Single Order Admin Page

WooCommerce: Get Customer ID From An Email Address

WooCommerce: Add Content To “New Account” Welcome Email

WooCommerce: Edit User Field @ My Account

WooCommerce: Populate Billing & Shipping When Adding A New User @ WP Dashboard

WooCommerce: Get Customer Second Last Order

WooCommerce: Change Address Format For a Specific Country

WooCommerce: Get Current User Orders By Status

WooCommerce: Get List Of All Customers

WooCommerce: Add Column to “Users” Admin Table

WooCommerce: Update User Meta After a Successful Order

WooCommerce: Check if User Has Bought Product in the Last 365 Days

WooCommerce: Display & Save WP User Profile Field @ Checkout