Temporarily Pause WooCommerce Store

If you are using WooCommerce and want a way to pause your store on specific days in case something happens including:

1. Sold out for the day
2. Plumbing or electrical issue at your store
3. Production issue at your warehouse
4. You’re In Vacation Mode
5. You’re Gone For The Holidays

Then today I am going to teach you how to temporarily pause your WooCommerce store easily.

Don’t Disable WooCommerce Plugin

The way I’ve seen some people pause their store is by deactivating their WooCommerce plugin. I would highly recommend against this because this changes the look of your whole website.

Although it does accomplish what you are trying to do – prevent purchases temporarily – it also removes all the products from your whole website. You don’t want this because although it will create 404 errors for each of your product pages.

So in case someone has your product page bookmarked or they find your product page via Ads or SEO, then they will get to a 404 page.

You’d rather have your products showing so they can express their interest in your product when it becomes available for purchase again. You can easily let people see your product and express interest without letting them purchase it by pausing your WooCommerce store while also collecting email addresses to let them know when the product is up for purchase again using something like the WooCommerce out of stock notice.

Use Woo Store Vacation Plugin

The best way to let people know that your store is closed for a specific amount of day or times is through this plugin that I use. This plugin is called Woo Store Vacation. There are a couple of reasons why I use this plugin instead of shutting down my store manually.

1. It adds a notice on top of every WooCommerce page (shop, products, cart, checkout) that you can add custom text to so your customers know your shop is closed and why it is closed.
2. You can set the days that your shop will be closed in advance so you don’t have to come back and open your shop the next day when it opens.

In order to use this plugin, find it in the WordPress repository in your WordPress dashboard. Install it, activate it and you will notice it in your WooCommerce settings.

Once you are in the settings, you can see all the options which are very straightforward.

You can set these things:

1. Set vacation mode by closing your store publicly.
2. Disable add to cart buttons, cart page, and checkout page.
3. Put a start date and end date on these functions.
4. Add a text color and background color to your notice.
5. Add a notice with button text and button URL that will appear on the top of every WooCommerce page.

You can put any custom notice so you can let customers now why you are closed for the day and when you will reopen.

PHP Snippet

I found a simple PHP Snippet on Business Bloomer that will help you disable the add the cart button on any of your WooCommerce products so that no one can add to cart or purchase any products.

The information on their page also shows you how to add a small banner on the bottom of your site to let people know more information on why you are pausing your store. For example, you can let people know the reason why your store is currently closed and when your store will open again.

Other Features You May Want

I want to help you understand what the customer is feeling when they want to buy your product but it is unavailable for purchase.

When they are on your product page and really want to buy your product but they can’t because you are closed for the day or any other reason, they might want to know what other ways they can get your product.

This includes conversation in their mind such as:

1. When is the next time this product will be available?
2. How can I know next time this product will be restricted again?

When you want to answer these questions for the customer, you can have your live chat support available or your email support available too.

However the best value you can get out of these customers who ask these questions and show interest in your product is if they sign up to get a notification from you.

This opens up your personal communication line with the customer. Afterall, this goes back to my belief that 1:1 communication has the highest conversion rate.