Admin Search for WooCommerce

WooCommerce has a search box on nearly every admin screen and each one searches something different. Orders search orders. Products search products. Customers are somewhere else again. So before you can look anything up you have to work out which screen is willing to answer.

This puts one search on the screens you already use: a panel above Orders, Products and Customers, a widget on the Dashboard, a Search WooCommerce item on the admin toolbar, and a window that opens over any admin screen with Ctrl+K or Cmd+K. All of them ask the same search, which looks at orders, products and users together and answers in a table you can move through with the arrow keys and open with Enter or a click. The part you typed is picked out in the results, and each order's status is coloured the way WooCommerce colours it.

Orders are found by number, billing or shipping name, email, phone, company or postcode. Products are found by name or SKU, and a variation by its own SKU. Users are found by username, name, email, phone, company or postcode, and a guest who never registered is found from their order. A phone number is compared by its digits, so 07912 345678 and +44 7912 345678 are one number however they were typed. Coupons are not searched.

It runs on your own website. The search reads a table of its own, kept up to date as orders, products and users are saved, so nothing you type leaves the site and nothing you type is stored. The first build runs in the background after activation and the settings screen shows how far it has got. In testing, 1,500 real orders were indexed in under two seconds, and with 150,000 records in the index a search finished in under a quarter of a second on the server.

It shows people only what they are already allowed to see. Order results need the same permission as the Orders screen, product results the same as Products, and user results the same as the Users list. Someone with none of them gets no search box at all, and nothing is granted that WooCommerce does not already give. On Orders, Products and Customers the panel is drawn instead of the list's own search box, and the list underneath, its filters and its columns are left alone.

The search takes its colours from the admin colour scheme each person has chosen, and was checked for readable contrast on all nine that WordPress ships. It works in right-to-left languages, and on a narrow screen each result becomes a card.

Pro looks inside the order. Search the name or SKU of a product and it finds every order that contains it, including a variation's SKU, which is a question WooCommerce's own order search cannot answer. Pro also finds an order from the payment reference the gateway stored on it, from a custom field you name (a purchase order number, an account reference), narrows what it found by order status, dates, payment method and shipping method, and keeps the searches your team runs every day as buttons. When you change what Pro searches, or install Pro over an existing install, the index rebuilds on its own, and Pro's settings travel with the settings export.

If a Pro licence lapses, nothing is deleted and nothing stops. Searching inside orders, payment references, custom fields, the filters and the saved searches all carry on working and the index keeps updating. What stops is changing Pro's settings: they stay on screen to read and cannot be edited until you renew.