WooCommerce Admin Archives - Business Bloomer

WooCommerce: 10 Crucial Issues That Should Be Fixed Right Now

I just spent the last 3 days in Porto with another 2,300 WordPressers at the first in-person WordCamp Europe since Berlin 2019. I had a blast, held a nice (yet long) workshop, spoke to many, but got tired too soon.

Later on, I realized that that tiredness was something more serious – in fact I tested positive against COVID for the first time in my life, and I’m now in self-isolation hoping it won’t last long… Another 7 days without my kid – send help!

Anyhow, what really struck me at WCEU 2022, and based on various chats and some data that I’ll share below, is that the WooCommerce ecosystem is in trouble.

A nicer way to put that? WooCommerce is not moving forward as fast as it should, and unless some key issues are addressed right now, in a few years time we all may pay the consequences.

Please note, this is not a rant. It’s a proper analysis, full of actionable information.

@ WooCommerce team - if you're reading this - my plan is to give you constructive feedback and tell you what the community (really) thinks, needs and wants, so that you can get a better picture of the current situation. I know you've already started working on this, so this is just a recap/reminder and a way to get the whole community realigned.

In this post, I will share my worries, my fears, the current WooCommerce issues, some data I collected at WCEU 2022 and then a list of actionable solutions that may be implemented in order to clear the backlog and get back on track – asap. Enjoy!

WooCommerce: Search Orders By SKU @ Admin

Exactly. By default, when you search for orders in the WordPress > WooCommerce > Orders backend, using a SKU will give you 0 results. Which is pretty poor for a store manager.

Let’s change this. Despite the code is a little complex, all you need is a simple copy & paste. Enjoy!

WooCommerce: View Thank You Page @ Order Admin

I’ve been testing for over an hour but finally I found a way to make this work. When you are in “Edit Order” view under WordPress Dashboard > WooCommerce > Orders, there is a dropdown of “Order actions”: “Email invoice”, “Resend new order notification”, etc.

A major problem I’ve always had while troubleshooting or working on the WooCommerce thank you page was that I had to build that URL by hand in order to view it again or to avoid placing yet another test order (it follows the format e.g. https://example.com/checkout/order-received/214008/?key=wc_order_aHB6YrmLOZIKP).

Well, from today, you can access that order thank you page URL directly from the “Order actions” dropdown. Enjoy!

WooCommerce: Sync Billing Name & WP User Name

When someone places an order via the WooCommerce checkout, there is a function (process_customer) that saves the checkout first & last name to the customer Billing address (WooCommerce). The same function also overwrites that same WP user first & last name (WordPress).

The same happens when someone updates the Billing address via the My Account edit address tab. There is a WooCommerce function (save_address) that copies Billing first & last name to the WP user first & last name.

You’d think that was sufficient to keep billing names and WP user names in sync – well, nope. You can also update billing first & last name from the user edit profile page (WP dashboard). In such case, WP user first & last name is NOT updated, and billing and user names are not in sync.

Today, we’ll study some code to make that happen, so that you never have to worry again about inconsistencies. Enjoy!

WooCommerce: Add Custom Field to “Quick Edit”

WooCommerce product custom fields are possibly the most used customization from what I’ve seen over the years on clients’ websites.

Adding custom fields to the product backend is pretty straight forward (including the input fields to be used for editing their values), however there are two additional areas where you need to do more work in order to allow for custom field editing: the “Quick Edit” and the “Bulk Edit” sections (WordPress Dashboard > Products).

We already saw how to allow a new custom field to appear in the Bulk Edit section, so this time we’ll talk about the Quick Edit window. So, how do we add a custom field in there (WordPress Dashboard > Products > Hover on a given product > Quick Edit)?

Well, here’s a fully working snippet for you. Enjoy!

WooCommerce: Create Product Programmatically

No matter if this snippet suits your needs or not, it’s still interesting to see how you can create a brand new WooCommerce product programmatically / automatically when a certain even triggers.

In this case studio, we’ll see how to generate a brand new product, set its featured image, price, category, title and a download file as soon as an image is uploaded in the WordPress backend Media section. This would be super useful for photographers for example – simply upload a new image to the WordPress Media Library, and a new product is automatically created.

Of course, you can customize the code and use it with different triggers. For example, you may need to create a new product automatically when each phone product needs always a matching case product, just with a different title. Or maybe you want to tie product creation once an order is placed.

Either way, 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: Force Max 1 Category Per Product

Here’s yet another snippet I use on A Piece of Sicily, my Sicilian marketplace, to make sure vendors can only select one product category for a given product. This is to make sure they make the best possible choice and also to avoid confusion and multiple listing.

Of course, the same can be used on your own WooCommerce install, in case you wish to limit the number of categories that can be assigned to each product (inside the snippet, you can even change “1” to “whatever number” and therefore define your own “max” e.g. max 2 categories).

This time I can’t make you “see” the customization as we’re in the backend, so please take a look at the screenshot below. Enjoy!

WooCommerce: Find Products With No Weight @ WP Admin

If your shipping rates depend on product weight, it is very likely you’ve forgotten to add weight to ALL your products. In this way, some shipping rates may be underestimated on the WooCommerce Checkout page.

So, here’s how to print a notice on the WordPress Dashboard > Products screen with a list of products that have no weight, together with the links to edit them quickly.

This is a handy snippet you can reuse for other case scenarios such as easily finding products with no dimensions, no prices, no images, no custom field value, or even a specific weight or given price. Enjoy!

WooCommerce: Add Product Table Columns @ Admin

The default WooCommerce Dashboard Products page (/wp-admin/edit.php?post_type=product page) shows the list of products in a table. Default fields are: Image, SKU, Stock, Price, Categories, Tags, Featured and Date.

Sometimes, these columns are not enough and you need more. For example, you might want to quickly take a look at a product custom field, such as “visibility” (whether the product is hidden or not).

So, here’s the snippet for that. Of course, you can adapt it to show your own custom field, an ACF field or whatever product-related information you require.

WooCommerce: Add Custom Field to “Bulk Actions” > “Edit”

As you know, one of the product bulk edit methods comes with WooCommerce out of the box. It can be found under “WP Dashboard” > “Products” > “Bulk Actions” > “Edit”. For example, you can decrease all prices by 10%, or bulk assign a new product category.

However, if you added a custom product field such as RRP, this won’t show automatically there in the bulk edit form – you’ll therefore need to add it via code. Thankfully, WooCommerce gives us a “hook” we can use to display the input in the bulk edit form. After that, another PHP function will be used to save and store the value.

Easy as pie! Just copy & paste into your functions.php. Enjoy 🙂

WooCommerce: Add Second Description @ Product Category Pages

In terms of SEO, if you’re trying to rank your product category pages, you really need to make the most of the default WooCommerce product category “description” and “thumbnail”. Most themes, if compatible with WooCommerce, will show this content right below the product category name and above products.

Nothing new so far. But what if you want to add another piece of content below the category products while also keeping the default description? Well, we’d need to customize the edit category page and display a new text editor field, save it, and finally display it where we want. So, here’s how they do it!

WooCommerce: Add New Subpage @ WordPress Admin Dashboard

If you’re developing custom WooCommerce documentation, reporting or functionalities for your clients, you probably also need to add a new “page” and a new “submenu link” to the WordPress Admin Dashboard.

This is a very interesting topic and in the same way you can hide elements, you can also add new ones. In my case, I had to implement a custom, admin-only form to enable product recommendations. Enjoy 🙂

WooCommerce: Remove “Metaboxes” @ Product Edit Admin Page

Let’s say you disabled product tags in your shop. Or maybe your store set up requires no short description. Or even, you want to hide a custom “metabox” (e.g. one of those widgets that appear on the Edit Product page). Either way, removing metaboxes and making the Edit Product page much cleaner is quite easy.

You just need the “ID” of the metabox and its position (‘normal’ or ‘side’, depending on whether it’s in the sidebar or not), and then this little PHP snippet. Enjoy!

WooCommerce: Remove Jetpack Ads @ WP Dashboard

Here’s a quick snippet to disable those (annoying) Jetpack ads and upsells that show in the WordPress dashboard if WooCommerce is active. Thankfully, Jetpack provides us with a filter, and hiding those banners is quite easy. Pity there is no option in the settings (as of now).

Here’s the 1-line PHP snippet for you – add it to your websites and avoid annoying banners for all users. Enjoy! Continue reading WooCommerce: Remove Jetpack Ads @ WP Dashboard

WooCommerce: Set Default Dashboard Login Page to “Products”

When you log in to the WordPress dashboard and WooCommerce is active, you might want to be redirected to a different page rather than the default “Dashboard” one.

For example, you might want to go directly to the “Products” admin page, or maybe to the “WooCommerce > Orders” page. Or, if you are like me on my development website, you want to go straight to the WordPress editor’s functions.php file 😀

Either way, saving time on login is what we’re chasing here. Pick your default login page, and then use the two snippets below to target actual logins and direct accesses to wp-admin. Enjoy! Continue reading WooCommerce: Set Default Dashboard Login Page to “Products”

WooCommerce: Disable Update Notifications @ WordPress Dashboard

We talked a lot about safely updating WooCommerce. The same applies to WordPress core, other plugins, themes… WordPress is such a delicate piece of software that you should ALWAYS know what to do before actually doing it 🙂

Sometimes, website managers feel great about clicking on that “Update Now” link in their WordPress dashboard. It seems – and it is – so easy. Problem is, they’ll likely break the website.

The best way of doing this properly is to run the updates (as well as custom code, plugin tests, design changes) on a “staging environment“, which should be provided by your hosting company.

Either way, those “Update Now” links are too dangerous. Only you (the developer) need to know that – while it’d be better if the other users who have access to the dashboard didn’t see anything and concentrated on WooCommerce orders or WordPress post and content editing.

Clearly, there is a way to disable the update notifications on a per-user basis or, even easier, to only have 1 user (possibly you) see these. The snippet is a little complex, but there is a lot of literature online – this is the one that worked for me! Continue reading WooCommerce: Disable Update Notifications @ WordPress Dashboard

WooCommerce: Add Column to Users Dashboard 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 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 🙂 Continue reading WooCommerce: Add Column to Users Dashboard Table

WooCommerce: Add Column to Orders Table @ WP Dashboard

The WooCommerce Orders Table, which can be found under WP Dashboard > WooCommerce > Orders, provides us with 7 default columns: Order – Date – Status – Billing – Ship to – Total – Actions. This is used by shop managers to have an overview of all orders, before eventually clicking on a specific one.

So the question is: how can we display additional columns to that same orders table, so that we can immediately visualize an order custom field, a specific product contained in the order, or anything order-related that can be “calculated” once we have access to the $order variable? Continue reading WooCommerce: Add Column to Orders Table @ WP Dashboard

WooCommerce: Display Custom Filters @ WP Dashboard > Products

If you go to WordPress Dashboard > Products you will find default product admin filters such as “Select a category”, “Filter by product type”, “Filter by stock status”. What if you want to add more custom filters to let your shop managers find products easily?

For example, you could add “Filter by product tag” (“product tags” are one of the two default WooCommerce “taxonomies” together with “product categories”). Or, if you use custom taxonomies such as product brands, you could add a “Filter by product brand” dropdown.

Thankfully this is super easy – and here comes the proof 🙂 Continue reading WooCommerce: Display Custom Filters @ WP Dashboard > Products

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