Sequential Order Number for WooCommerce – Setup Guide (Basic Version)

This is a complete documentation of the free plugin Sequential order number for WooCommerce to help you convert your WooCommerce orders into a custom and sequential format.

• Supports sequential order numbers for WooCommerce
• Enable custom formatting for order numbers in your store by adding a prefix and starting number for orders.
• Option to have order date prefixes for all orders
• Support Subscription orders.
• Search custom order numbers from the Orders page.
• Compatibility with WooCommerce Subscriptions and WebToffee Subscriptions plugins.

You can install the plugin either from the WordPress plugin directory or as a zip downloaded from the WordPress.org website. You can learn more about the installation procedure by reading the article How to install a free plugin from WordPress.

From the WordPress dashboard, navigate to WooCommerce >Settings > Sequential Order Number. Following is the Sequential order number settings window. You can configure the settings as per your preference.

• Order number format – Select an order number format with a combination of number, prefix, or date.

• Prefix – The prefix will appear at the beginning of the order number. For eg, if you enter ‘WT-‘ as the prefix with the start number as 100, then your first order number will be WT-100. To add a suffix to the order number you will have to purchase the premium version of the Sequential order for WooCommerce plugin.

• Order date format – The order date will appear after the prefix. Select one or more date formats and use alphanumeric characters to separate them. For example, pick the date format [y]/[m]/[d] separated by ‘/’ to get the order date format as 21/07/28. Pick any of the date formats from the list of pre-defined formats as given below:

• Order number length – Maintains a fixed length for order number padded with ‘0’ excluding prefix. For example, entering the order number length as 7 with order number 123 and prefix ‘wt’ will generate a sequential order number as wt0000123.
• Preview custom order number – Preview your custom order number with the newly input prefixes and date formats to know how it will appear for WooCommerce orders.
• Start Number – Here you can add a custom starting number for your store’s order number.
• Apply for all orders – Enabling this option will change starting number and/or prefix for all the existing and new orders in your store. If unchecked, it will only apply to the new orders.
• Track orders – Enable the track order option to track the sequential order number. Shortcode can be inserted to track orders.
• Search orders – Enable this option for searching plugin-generated orders from the WooCommerce orders page.

WooCommerce offers this shortcode to link orders based on the order ID. You can add the shortcode as a post and use it to track the orders. The shortcode is as follows:

[[woocommerce_order_tracking]]

A screenshot of the order tracking page on a website created using the shortcode follows.

You can view all the details regarding an order by entering the order ID and billing email corresponding to that order.

You need to enable this option to search plugin-generated orders from the WooCommerce orders page. If you disable it, you will not be able to search for custom order numbers from the orders page.

Finally, click on the Save Settings button. As a result, the store’s order numbers will be updated.

Following is a screenshot of an order page containing sequential orders.

In the below screenshot, the values assigned for each field are as shown below:

• Starting number – 100
• Order number format – [Prefix][Date][Number]
• Prefix – ORDER
• Order date format – ‘[Y]-‘ Current year (2024) with a hyphen as separator
• Order number length – 6

By default, WooCommerce provides a search option on the Orders page to search orders based on certain criteria, such as Order ID, customer email, product name, etc. Installing the Sequential order number for WooCommerce plugin adds the order number as an additional search criterion. Enable the Search Orders option from the plugin Settings page (WooCommerce > Settings > Sequential Order Number) to use the order number as the search criteria.

To sum up, if order management takes up a lot of your time, then the plugin will be helpful in making it easier for you. If you are dealing with lots of orders in your store on a daily basis, you can save time tracking orders quickly.