Product Sorting Archives - Business Bloomer

WooCommerce: Sort Order Items by Name, SKU, Total, Quantity

By default, WooCommerce displays order items in the same order customers added them to the cart. That might work fine in most cases, but for many store owners, it’s more useful to have a consistent and logical sequence instead — especially when reviewing orders in the admin, generating invoices, or printing packing slips.

With a simple filter, you can change the sorting behavior of order items everywhere — on the Thank You page, in the admin order view, in customer accounts, and in any plugin that uses the same data source.

In this tutorial, we’ll go through a handy snippet that reorders WooCommerce order items using the woocommerce_order_get_items filter. You’ll see how to sort items alphabetically, by SKU, by quantity, by total value, or even by product category, depending on your specific workflow or fulfillment preferences.

Displaying WooCommerce Products in Swedish Alphabetical Order

In a recent Business Bloomer Club discussion, a member shared a challenge with displaying product titles alphabetically according to Swedish standards in WooCommerce.

By default, WooCommerce sorts letters like å, ä, and ö before “A,” which doesn’t match the Swedish alphabetical order, where they should appear at the end. Efforts to adjust the database settings directly didn’t resolve the issue, even after disabling plugins and testing with the Storefront theme.

This scenario highlights a common hurdle for WooCommerce users working with international character sorting. Below is a breakdown of the troubleshooting steps taken and the eventual solution.

WooCommerce: Display Only Products On Sale @ Shop

In my own WooCommerce shop, for Black Friday, I wanted to send customers directly to the Shop page showcasing only items on sale. To my surprise, WooCommerce doesn’t provide a built-in way to sort products by “on sale” out of the box.

This led me to explore a solution that not only solved the problem but also added a new sorting option to the WooCommerce Shop page dropdown.

Now, with a simple code snippet, you can enable a “Sort by On Sale” feature, or even use the “orderby=on_sale” parameter with your Shop page URL to show sale items effortlessly!

WooCommerce: Sort By Featured Products @ Shop

The “Default sorting” dropdown sorts products by menu_order and then title on the WooCommerce Shop, Category and Tag pages.

But what if you want to place the featured products first in the list (I mean, why would anyone set products as featured if you can’t really “promote” them on the Shop page)?

In today’s case study, we will replace the “Default sorting” option with a workaround, create a new one with the same label (so that customers won’t notice it), set it as the default sorting option, and make sure it sorts by featured products first, and then by menu_order and title. Enjoy!

WooCommerce: Sort Products By Stock @ Admin Dashboard

We’ve already seen how to sort frontend products by in stock first and out of stock last, but what about doing the exact same for administrators and shop managers in the backend?

Sometimes shops have to deal with a lot of “sold” products and the products table becomes messy, so this is a way to sort by stock status (In stock -> Out of stock) on load. You can then use the column headers to sort by other data as usual, so this will only work once you access /wp-admin/edit.php?post_type=product page.

So, here’s a very simple snippet for you. Enjoy!

WooCommerce: Display “In Stock” Products First @ Shop

We’ve already seen how to add a custom “Product Sorting” option to the “Default Sorting” dropdown in the WooCommerce Shop page.

The task I was presented with, however, was to display items based on a custom “meta key”. Now, if you have no idea what a “meta key” is, don’t worry too much. For example, “_stock_status” is one of these keys, and therefore you can sort products by that key as opposed to product name, date, price, etc.

So, let’s see how to show all out of stock products as last in the shop, category and loop pages. As usual, simply copy/paste this little plugin in your functions.php and you’ll get the wanted result 🙂

WooCommerce: How to Enable Product Filters (i.e. “Ajax Filters”)?

If your WooCommerce store has many products, online customers might get easily lost. There might be way too many pages to visit (“product pagination”) before finding the product they’re looking for. Needless to say, this is a huge loss for your business. Possibly, they’ll never come back.

If you shop on popular ecommerce websites such as Amazon and eBay, you know they carry a billion products each or so. Thankfully, on top of the very useful search bar, these websites provide “product filters” in the sidebar. You can refine by price, reviews, tag, category and so on; the website won’t “refresh” but instead it will return the filtered results immediately on that same page.

These are called “Ajax Product Filters” (Ajax is a set of applications that run in the background without forcing a website page refresh). And as Amazon and eBay just proved to you, these filters are absolutely a must if you have 100+ WooCommerce products.

Luckily, there are plugins for that. And they’re either free or quite cheap when you compare this small cost to your potential Return On the Investment (ROI).

Besides, if you have lots of products you also already have several WooCommerce product categories, product tags, product attributes, product custom fields, prices, stock statuses. This means that implementing Ajax Product Filters in your WooCommerce store might be a matter of 10 minutes: activate the plugin, choose the filter criteria and your users will automatically see a smooth filter widget in the sidebar!

So, what are the best “WooCommerce Ajax Product Filter” plugins?

Tag: Product Sorting