Product Expiry Dates for WooCommerce

Some things should not be sold after a certain date. Food and drink have a best-before date, a licence or a warranty covers a fixed period, a seasonal line stops making sense in February, and an event ticket is worthless the morning after. WooCommerce has no way to say so.

Product Expiry Dates adds an Expiry tab to every product, with one box on it: the date that product can no longer be sold after. When that moment passes it comes off sale on its own, without anybody having to remember.

The date is enforced in both of the places it has to be. A product past its date cannot be added to a basket, and a basket that already had one in it cannot be checked out — which matters more than it sounds, because a basket can easily outlive the date it was filled before. The customer is told which product to take out, by name.

An expired product is taken off sale, not marked out of stock. It has not run out of units, and saying that it has would tell every report, feed and stock email something untrue about your shop. It stays in your shop, unbuyable, with a line on the page explaining why.

Pro is for shops where one date box per product is not enough. A shelf life dates your whole catalogue at once, and each category can carry a figure of its own — days for salad, years for tins. Variations can be dated separately, dates can be typed straight into the products list or carried in and out through your product CSV, and staff and trade accounts can be allowed to buy past-date stock so last season's lines still clear. It warns you a few days before a date passes, on your dashboard and by email, and can mark stock down as the date approaches so it sells instead of being thrown away.

The free version is permanent. It does not expire, needs no licence key, and never contacts Plugin City. Pro is the complete plugin — everything in Free plus the above — and it installs in place of the free version, keeping every date and setting you have already made.