WooCommerce Checkout – Step-by-step Configuration

WooCommerce checkout features – which are mostly related to the payment settings – play a vital role in running an online store, and it is often thanks to them that a customer decides to make a purchase. Therefore, if you provide your customers with convenient payment methods, they are more likely to buy from you. As we did in the past, we are now going to guide you step-by-step through the setting options which we will find under the Checkout tab.

Go to WooCommerce → Settings → Checkout.

WooCommerce Checkout process

Coupons

Enable the use of coupons – select this option if you would like to create coupons which your customers can use when placing an order. If you turn on this feature, a coupon code field will appear on the cart and checkout pages.

Calculate coupon discounts sequentially – choose this feature if you want multiple coupons to lower the price discounted by the previous coupon rather than allowing multiple coupons to always lower the same value of the full price.

For example: your customer has received two coupons which they are using while placing an order:

• The full price of the ordered product is $100.
• The first one is a 10% off coupon, the second one – 20% off.
• How we calculate the discount if we turn off the feature: $100 * 10% + $100 * 20% = $10 + $20. Therefore, the discount is $30 off while the discounted product price is $70.
• How we calculate the discount if we turn on the feature: $100 * 10% + ($100 * 10%) * 20% = $10 + $18. Therefore, the discount is equal to $28 and the lowered price is $72.

Checkout process

Enable guest checkout – select this option if you want to allow for placing orders without creating an account. We suggest that you turn on this feature since many customers decide against buying if they need to set up an account.

Force secure checkout – enable this feature so that placing orders will go through a secure connection (https://). You must have a SSL certificate, however, you will need such a certificate for virtually every online store nowadays.

Checkout pages

Cart page – select a specific page that you will use as the cart page. You will need to include the [woocommerce_cart] shortcode in the code of your site.

Checkout page – choose a specific page that you will use as the checkout page. You will need to include the [woocommerce_checkout] shortcode in the code of your site.

Terms and conditions – select a specific page that contains the terms and conditions. As a result, you will require your customers to accept your terms and conditions before they can place an order. Also, you can read an article about accepting terms and conditions here →

Checkout endpoints

In this section, you need to define unique endpoints that will be added to the URL:
yourstorename.com/order/

Thanks to endpoints, each page will receive a unique URL. Remember not to use diacritics or spaces here. For example, a URL of a page on which you thank your customer for placing an order may look like this:
yourstorename.com/order/order-received/

Payment gateways

The table shows all the payment gateways that are available at your store. You can drag and drop the gateways to rearrange them. Also, you can press the name of a specific payment gateway in order to edit it.

When you install WooCommerce, you will find the following 4 available payment gateways, but of course you can install more:

• Direct bank transfer (BACS)
• Check payments
• Cash on delivery
• PayPal

How to manage WooCommerce checkout fields

As you see WooCommerce checkout has a great experience out of the box, but there is one crucial feature missing. It is not possible to manage WooCommerce checkout fields. This is sometimes necessary to do.

Imagine that you only sell digital goods and you do not want to ask your customers for all address information. Just name and e-mail will do. Or on the other hand you may want to add some fields to the WooCommerce checkout. Let’s say you want to collect some information about your customers, i.e. VAT number or what the do professionally.

Here at WP Desk we get one very valuable information about our customer that we use to streamline our plugin experience, how do our customers use the plugins:

By asking this question we know who are our customers and what’s more important how much each group spends and how much revenue we make.

This simple but powerful feature is unfortunately not available in WooCommerce.

But there’s a plugin for managing WooCommerce checkout fields

When we first started using WooCommerce we were certain that managing checkout fields will be a crucial feature and we created a plugin for that: Flexible Checkout Fields.

It let’s you manage your checkout fields by hiding unnecessary fields, adding new ones, make them required or optional. In the PRO version you will also be able to add more field types, manage custom sections or use conditional logic. Make sure to check out the plugin by clicking the button below.

WooCommerce Checkout Hooks Visual Guide

Are you a WooCommerce developer and want to customize the checkout page with hooks? Great, see our WooCommerce checkout hooks reference with a live visual guide.

Read more: WooCommerce Checkout Hooks – A Visual Guide with Examples →