Offline Payment Methods for WooCommerce

Plenty of shops are paid after the order, not during it: a bank transfer that arrives in two days, cash on delivery, a check in the post, an invoice for a regular customer, a deposit paid at the counter. The order sits On hold, the customer has to find the bank details, and nothing on the order says whether the money has arrived.

This makes each offline method an ordinary WooCommerce payment method of its own. You can call it anything (Bank transfer, Pay on delivery, Pay by check, Pay by invoice, Pay in store) and give it a description for the checkout, instructions for afterwards, bank details, and the order status its orders start in: on hold, pending payment or processing. Each one appears in the classic checkout and in the Checkout block, and because it is a genuine payment method it appears on the WooCommerce Payments screen and can be shown or hidden by any plugin that works with payment methods. PluginCity Payment Rules was tested with it.

What the customer needs to pay is put where they look: on the thank-you page, in the customer's order emails, on the page where they pay for an existing order, and in My Account. Use {order_number} and {order_total} in the text, and give each method a payment reference such as Order 1042. The bank details (account name, bank name, account number, sort code or routing number, IBAN, SWIFT or BIC) are shown only after the order is placed, to the customer who placed it or someone holding their order link. They are not shown at checkout, are not put in the shop's own copy of an email, and are never written to a log.

What you need to track is on the order. An Offline payment box says whether the money has arrived, and a Mark as paid button records the date and a reference, adds a note, and moves an On hold or Pending order on to Processing the way WooCommerce does for any paid order. WooCommerce's own unpaid-order timer leaves offline orders alone, so a Pending bank transfer is not cancelled an hour later.

Pro makes the tracking less manual. Every order gets a unique payment reference, such as PAY-1042-7K, shown to the customer with the bank details and searchable in the orders list, so a line on a bank statement finds its order. Customers can be reminded once by email after the number of days you choose, and an order nobody has paid for can be cancelled automatically after the number of days you choose, with its stock put back. Both only look at orders placed after you switch them on, and an order with a deposit recorded is never cancelled. The orders list gets a column that says Paid or Unpaid and a filter for it, and you can mark many orders as paid at once, with an audit log of who recorded what. A deposit or part payment can be recorded against an order, with the balance still owed shown on the order and in the list, and when the deposits add up to the total the order is marked as paid.

Pro also draws a QR code of the bank details on your own server, so nothing is sent anywhere to make it. For an order in euros on a method with an IBAN it holds a European transfer request that many banking apps in the euro area can read. For any other order it holds the details as text. Each bank detail can be copied with one click, each method can have its own icon, and each can have its own wording for order emails. A CSV of the unpaid offline orders can be downloaded, with no bank details in it.

If a Pro licence lapses, nothing is deleted and nothing breaks at the checkout. Every payment method keeps working and what you typed into Pro's settings stays saved and on screen to read. What stops is what Pro adds, and you can add no more than three methods. The licence screen lists exactly what is going unused, and renewing switches it back on as you left it.

It does not take card payments and never moves money: it tells the customer how to pay you and lets you record that they did.