Field Guide Field Guide for WooCommerce

Contents

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Every section in the guide, grouped by theme.

I Part One

What you can sell

Every product type in WooCommerce, how they actually work, and what surprises you.

  1. 01 Simple Products One thing, one price, one SKU. The foundation everything else builds on.
  2. 02 Variable Products Size, color, material — products with options that each have their own price, SKU, and stock.
  3. 03 Grouped Products A display wrapper for related products. No stock logic of its own — each child product manages its own inventory.
  4. 04 Downloadable & Virtual Products Files, digital access, and services. Two flags that do different things — and you often need both.
  5. 05 External / Affiliate Products Products that live on someone else's site. You display them — they handle the sale.
  6. 06 Product Add-Ons Custom fields at checkout — engraving text, gift wrapping, color preferences. Flexible. But does not track stock.
  7. 07 Measured & Weight-Based Products Fabric by the yard. Rope by the meter. Coffee by the kilo. Products sold by measurement, not by unit.
  8. 08 Product Bundles Kits and sets with real stock tracking. Unlike Add-Ons, inventory actually deducts per component. Unlike Grouped, there's a single cart item and a bundle price.
  9. 09 Composite Products Multi-step product builders. "Pick your base, then your topping, then your packaging." The most powerful product configuration in WooCommerce — and the steepest learning curve.
  10. 10 Print on Demand Printful, Printify, Gooten — products that don't exist until someone orders them. Zero inventory, but real operational friction.
  11. 11 Subscriptions Recurring billing — subscription boxes, SaaS, replenishment, memberships with ongoing fees. Powerful, but it adds complexity to every layer of your store.
  12. 12 Memberships Gated access to content, products, or discounts based on membership plans. Often confused with Subscriptions — they solve different problems and usually need each other.
  13. 13 Content Drip & Online Courses Selling access to content that unlocks over time. Courses, lesson sequences, gated libraries. WooCommerce can do it — but not alone.
  14. 14 Bookings & Appointments Time-slot and resource-based products. Tours, consultations, equipment rental, classes. WooCommerce Bookings exists — but it's not your only option.
  15. 15 Marketplace & Multi-Vendor Multiple vendors selling through your store. This is the hardest WooCommerce configuration by far. This is not a product type — it's a business model, and the operational complexity is massive.
  16. 16 Stock Management Cheat Sheet Which product types track inventory, which don't, and what surprises you.
II Part Two

Running your store

Payments, shipping, tax, emails — the operational layer beneath the storefront.

  1. 01 Payments & Gateways How money moves from customer to you. What a gateway does, how to evaluate your options, and the operational realities nobody talks about.
  2. 02 KYC, MCC Codes & Account Verification The invisible layer beneath payments. Get this wrong and your money stops moving — or never starts.
  3. 03 Shipping Zones, methods, live rates, and the matching logic that confuses everyone at least once.
  4. 04 Tax: US Sales Tax & Nexus The concept of nexus, how automated tax works, when $0 tax is correct, and the setup that fixes the most common tax confusion.
  5. 05 Tax: EU VAT, Cross-Border & B2B The reality of selling within and into the EU. VAT on digital goods, intra-community supply, reverse charge, OSS — and where WooCommerce's tooling doesn't keep up.
  6. 06 Emails How WooCommerce sends emails, why they vanish, and the diagnostic path that saves hours of troubleshooting.
  7. 07 Orders & Statuses The order lifecycle, what triggers each status change, and the operational details that affect your daily workflow.
  8. 08 Checkout: Block vs Classic The transition from shortcode-based checkout to Block Checkout — what's different, what breaks, and how to decide which to use.
III Part Three

When things go wrong

Diagnostic protocols for the failures you will encounter — sooner or later.

  1. 01 The Conflict Testing Method The foundational diagnostic technique. Before anything else — before forum posts, before support tickets — do this.
  2. 02 "It's a WooCommerce Problem" When a third-party plugin developer blames WooCommerce. How to identify the real boundary.
  3. 03 Cart & Checkout Failures "Can't add to cart." "Variation unavailable." Almost always a conflict.
  4. 04 Shipping Rates Not Returning The diagnostic sequence for "no shipping options at checkout."
  5. 05 Tax Showing as $0 When zero tax is correct (and when it's not).
  6. 06 Email Delivery Failures The step-by-step protocol for "customers aren't getting order emails."
  7. 07 Duplicate Orders Why orders appear twice — and how to isolate the cause.
  8. 08 Database Mismatches After Migrations When orders show the wrong customer's data after a migration, restore, or staging sync.
  9. 09 Fraud & Card Testing Attacks What card testing looks like, the severity spectrum, and how to respond at each level.
  10. 10 Intermittent & Ghost Issues It happens sometimes. You can't reproduce it. Everything "should" work.
  11. 11 Performance Problems "WooCommerce is slow." Usually it's not WooCommerce.
  12. 12 Integrations & the Firewall Problem When Cloudflare, hosting firewalls, or security tools block legitimate connections.
IV Part Four

For agencies & builders

Pre-launch, staging, client handoff, and evaluating extensions before you commit.

  1. 01 Pre-Launch Checklist Everything to verify before a store goes live. Missing one of these means lost sales, lost data, or a lost client.
  2. 02 Staging → Production Pitfalls What goes wrong when pushing staging to live.
  3. 03 Client Handoff & Knowledge Transfer What to document when handing a store to a client.
  4. 04 Extension Evaluation Framework How to assess a plugin before committing a client's store to it.
V Part Five

Extending with code

Custom plugins, hooks, and working with AI tools — for when you outgrow extensions.

  1. 01 Why Build Your Own Plugin When a custom plugin is better than hunting for an extension that half-fits your needs.
  2. 02 The Custom Plugin Approach Why a plugin file is better than pasting code into functions.php — and how to structure it.
  3. 03 Hooks, Filters & the WooCommerce API The fundamental concepts you need to understand — even if AI writes the code for you.
  4. 04 Using Claude Code to Build Extensions AI as infrastructure for building custom WooCommerce functionality. Not as a magic box — as a tool you direct.
  5. 05 Real Examples: Small Plugins That Replace Extensions Actual use cases where a custom plugin is the right call.
  6. 06 Maintaining Custom Code Custom plugins aren't "set and forget." Here's what ongoing maintenance looks like.
  7. 07 Advanced Diagnostic Snippets One-time code you run to diagnose a problem, then throw away. The most powerful troubleshooting technique nobody teaches.
  8. 08 Server Resource Planning for WooCommerce WooCommerce is a write-heavy, scheduled-action-dependent application. Most hosting plans aren't optimized for it. Here's how to estimate what you actually need.