TL;DR
“Order approval” means two different things for WooCommerce stores. With store-side approval, you review an order before you accept it, for example to check a new trade customer or confirm a custom job. With customer-side approval, someone at the customer’s company signs off on a colleague’s order before it goes through, to keep their own spending in check. They solve different problems, and most plugins only do one of them.
Search for “WooCommerce order approval” and you’ll find a page of plugins that look like they do the same thing. Many of them don’t. The phrase covers two separate jobs, and buying a plugin built for the wrong one is a common and annoying mistake.
Store-side approval: you decide
With store-side approval, an order arrives and waits until someone at your store accepts or declines it. The customer is asking you to sell to them, and you decide whether to.
Stores use it to:
- Check a new wholesale or trade customer before giving them access or terms.
- Confirm they can deliver a custom, made-to-order or unusually large order.
- Look over orders that seem unusual before shipping them.
The approve button is in your WP Admin. The customer usually never sees who approved it, only that the order was accepted.
Customer-side approval: their manager decides
With customer-side approval, the decision happens inside the customer’s company. A member of their staff places an order, and a manager at the same company approves or rejects it. You’re not part of the decision. You receive the order once it’s approved.
Customers ask for it when:
- They want a say before anyone spends more than a certain amount.
- Some products, like furniture or electronics, always need a manager’s OK.
- They want several staff to order without giving every one of them a blank cheque.
The approve button is in the customer’s own account on your storefront, and the approver is one of their people.
Side by side
| Store-side | Customer-side | |
|---|---|---|
| Who approves | Your staff | A manager at the customer’s company |
| What it decides | Whether you accept the order | Whether the customer wants to spend the money |
| Where the button is | WP Admin | The customer’s account on your storefront |
| Who usually asks for it | You | Your customer |
| Rules usually set | Once, for the whole store | Per customer company |
How to tell which kind a plugin does
Product pages often just say “order approval”. These four questions get to the answer quickly:
- Where is the Approve button? If it’s only in WP Admin, it’s store-side.
- Who can press it? If it has to be your staff, it’s store-side. If it’s a person with a role at the customer company, it’s customer-side.
- Can the rules differ from one customer company to the next? Customer-side approval needs this, because every company has its own idea of what needs sign-off.
- When is the card charged? Some plugins take payment at checkout and refund it if the order is declined. Others don’t charge anything until the order is approved. For customer-side approval, charging afterwards saves everyone a lot of refunds.
Can you need both?
Yes. A trade supplier might vet new customers before giving them an account (store-side) and also let each customer’s office manager approve their staff’s orders (customer-side). These usually come from different plugins. Both hold orders at checkout, so try them together on a staging copy of your store before going live.
Where CrewCommerce fits
I make CrewCommerce, and it’s a customer-side tool. Orders that match your rules go to the customer’s own Manager or Admin, in their account on your store, and nothing is charged until they approve. You set the rules, and you can give each company its own threshold.
It doesn’t vet new customers for you, so if you need that as well, use a store-side tool alongside it. The one time you step in is when a company has nobody left who could approve an order: you’re emailed, and you can approve or reject it yourself from WP Admin.
The guide to letting a customer’s manager approve their team’s orders walks through the customer-side setup.
Questions people ask
Is order approval the same as a pending order in WooCommerce?
No. Pending payment in WooCommerce means an order is waiting to be paid. Nobody is approving anything. Approval plugins add their own status, such as Pending Approval, for orders waiting on a decision.
Which kind of approval do B2B customers usually ask for?
When a customer asks “can my manager approve orders before they go through?”, they mean customer-side approval. Deciding which new trade accounts to accept is store-side approval.
Can one plugin do both?
Some can, sometimes through an add-on. Ask the four questions in this article about each plugin you’re considering: where the Approve button is, who can press it, whether rules differ per company, and when the card is charged.