Order Cancellation for WooCommerce

Most cancellations are somebody who ordered the wrong thing and noticed a minute later. Handled by email, that costs you a reply, costs the customer a wait for an answer they already know, and sometimes costs you a parcel that went out anyway because nobody read the message in time.

Order Cancellation gives every order a window. While that window is open, and while the order is still in one of the statuses you allow, the customer sees a Cancel order option on the order itself with the time left counting down beside it — in My Account, beside the order it belongs to, and on the order confirmation page. When the window closes, or you move the order on, the option goes and the order is yours to pick and pack as usual.

A paid order is treated more carefully than an unpaid one. By default an unpaid order is cancelled there and then, and a paid one comes to you as a request to approve or decline from the order screen. That is deliberate rather than a limitation: marking an order Cancelled in WooCommerce moves no money at all, so a plugin claiming to have settled the payment would be telling you something it cannot know. You keep the decision and the record of it, and you settle up with your payment provider the way you already do.

An order keeps the window it was given. Shorten the shop-wide setting tomorrow and the orders you took today stand exactly as they were, because each deadline is worked out once and written onto its order rather than recalculated from whatever the settings say now. The countdown the customer sees is worked out on your server too, so a clock that is wrong on their laptop cannot buy them another hour.

Eight of the sentences a customer reads about cancelling are boxes on the settings screen, from the button itself to the answer a request gets. You can offer a list of reasons to pick from and a note in the customer's own words, so a cancellation arrives telling you something you can act on rather than just changing a status.

Pro is for shops where one window for everything is not enough. A window can be typed onto a single product or onto a whole product category, so a printed mug and a pair of socks need not have the same amount of time. Made-to-order and perishable goods can be marked so they are never cancellable online, whatever else is set. Windows can follow the delivery method, the payment method, the customer's role, or what the order is worth. Cancellation can close the moment you start work on an order, whatever is left on the clock. And the deadline sits on the order screen with the means to extend it, reopen it, or close it now.

One thing Pro does differently from the rest of our plugins, on purpose. If a licence lapses, every rule you configured carries on being enforced — the windows, the excluded products and the cut-off all go on working. What stops is the editing: the Pro settings go read-only and say why. A renewal somebody forgets must never be the thing that makes made-to-order goods cancellable again.