WooCommerce: Prevent Duplicate Orders

Sometimes customers accidentally submit the same order twice, or there may be a temporary issue with a WooCommerce payment gateway or a plugin conflict—such as the Sucuri Firewall problem in March 2025.

This can result in duplicate charges, refunds, chargebacks, admin costs and a poor user experience.

I recently ran into this issue myself and decided to create a simple solution. By checking if the same customer placed an identical paid order within the last 2 minutes, we can block the second attempt and show a helpful message.

If you’ve experienced something similar or want to proactively prevent it, here’s a quick snippet you can add to your site to avoid duplicate WooCommerce orders.

PHP Snippet: Return Error If “Same” Order Was Submit <2 Minutes Ago @ WooCommerce Checkout

This snippet hooks into the WooCommerce checkout process using woocommerce_checkout_process. The goal is to prevent customers from accidentally placing duplicate orders within a short time frame.

Inside the function, we first define a set of arguments to query recent orders. We look for a maximum of one order ('limit' => 1) placed by the same customer, using the billing email from the current checkout ($_POST['billing_email']).

We also check if the order was created within the last 2 minutes. This is done using 'date_created' => '>' . ( time() - 2 * MINUTE_IN_SECONDS ), which filters out older orders.

Next, we only consider orders that have a paid status, using wc_get_is_paid_statuses(). This ensures we’re not comparing against failed or pending orders.

We then match the total amount of the current cart with the order total ('total' => WC()->cart->get_total( 'edit' )) to confirm it’s an identical order.

Finally, the 'return' => 'ids' parameter makes the query more efficient by only retrieving order IDs.

If a matching order is found, we use wc_add_notice() to block the checkout and display an error message, advising the customer to wait before retrying.

/**
 * @snippet       WooCommerce Prevent Duplicate Order
 * @tutorial      https://businessbloomer.com/woocommerce-customization
 * @author        Rodolfo Melogli, Business Bloomer
 * @compatible    WooCommerce 9
 * @community     https://businessbloomer.com/club/
 */

add_action( 'woocommerce_checkout_process', 'bb_prevent_duplicate_orders' );

function bb_prevent_duplicate_orders() {
    $args = [
        'limit' => 1,
        'customer' => $_POST['billing_email'],
        'date_created' => '>' . ( time() - 2 * MINUTE_IN_SECONDS ),
        'status' => wc_get_is_paid_statuses(),
		  'total' => WC()->cart->get_total( 'edit' ),
		  'return' => 'ids',
    ];
    $orders = wc_get_orders( $args );
    if ( $orders ) {
    	wc_add_notice( __( 'It looks like you already placed this order recently. Please wait a minute before trying again.' ), 'error' );
    }
}