How do I remove checkout option from WooCommerce?

Disable WooCommerce checkout is a common requirement. Particularly for WooCommerce store builders who want to drive traffic to their Amazon product listings and not take payment on their own eCommerce store.

You can remove the WooCommerce checkout option without using ANY code. It’s simple enough out of the box to have WooCommerce disable cart and checkout functionality without doing much at all to the core WooCommerce settings.

How to Disable Checkout in WooCommerce

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Removing the Checkout Option in WooCommerce & Disable Cart

The settings you need to alter to disable the WooCommerce Checkout are mostly on the WooCommerce Product Pages.

Each product you add to the WooCommerce product catalog has a “Product Type”

If you select the “External / Affiliate Product” product type there will be no option to purchase the product through your online store.

Instead, if you enter the URL of the page you want to send the customer to – and the text you want to show on the call to action button, such as “buy on Amazon” the user will be presented with a Product page where their only option is to browse and click the call to action which takes them to the link you’ve specified for the product.

Here’s a screenshot of the options in the WooCommerce product page editor.

Removing the Checkout Page, Disable Cart Page, Remove Account Page in WooCommerce

If you setup all of your products in this way, in essence you removed the Checkout functionality from WooCommerce altogether.

In fact, you’ve removed the cart functionality from WooCommerce too.

Our advice from a security perspective is to redirect these pages to the homepage – and especially the default “My Account” page – which shouldn’t enable users to register for an account on the My Account page anyway – again for WooCommerce security reasons.

Just remember when it comes to disabling the WooCommerce checkout page functionality, if the user can’t add a product to cart, there is no way to proceed to checkout.

However, bots don’t see the world the way users do – so it’s worth putting in place the redirects.

Other ways to disable WooCommerce Cart and Checkout

Of course, the other way to disable the WooCommerce checkout is to switch off all payment methods.

Even if a user adds a product to cart, they won’t be able to proceed to checkout as “no valid payment methods are offered”.

This isn’t great for user experience – it does nothing in terms of sending traffic to products on Amazon for Example.

Using this method for disabling the WooCommerce Checkout in combination with the above actions of:

Setting all products to External / Affiliate type products in WooCommerce
Redirecting the Checkout, Cart and My Account Pages to the homepage

These actions will provide you with the most robust solution for removing the WooCommerce Checkout page and all associated functionality so you can focus on sending traffic to your desired location from your website.

Using a Plugin to Disable WooCommerce Cart and Checkout (Catalog Mode)

There are a number of plugins that have been designed for the specific purpose of disabling the WooCommerce Checkout – turning your WooCommerce Website into a “Catalog” with products that can be viewed but not purchased.

We recommend the WooCommerce Catalog Mode plugin from Yith (they’re a top class developer of WooCommerce plugins)

Enabling Catalog Mode in your WordPress WooCommerce Theme

Some WordPress themes designed specifically for WooCommerce have a Catalogue Mode option built into the theme options.

The Atelier Theme by Swift Ideas is one of those themes! It’s built specifically for WooCommerce and under the WooCommerce options has the ability for you to enable WooCommerce Catalog mode to deactivate WooCommerce Checkout and Cart.

WooCommerce disable add to cart button for certain products

As you can control the product type for each product, it’s possible to have some products setup as “simple products” some as “variable products” and some ad “External / Affiliate Type Products”

When you set a product to the External / Affiliate Type Product in WooCommerce you have the opportunity to disable the add to cart button for that product.

Simply do NOT enter a “Link” or URL into the Product Link box.

This means everything will display as normal on the WooCommerce product page, but the Add To Cart button will be hidden (well actually the add to cart button is disabled altogether).

WooCommerce hide proceed to checkout button on Cart Page

If you’d like to hide the proceed to checkout button on the WooCommerce Cart page, my first instinct is to ask exactly what you’re aiming to achieve. Of course it can be hidden with CSS, but ultimately you’re trying to customize the checkout experience and Edit the WooCommerce Cart page.

If you’re trying to edit the WooCommerce cart page – check out this article.

Looking for WooCommerce Help and Support?

If you’re regularly looking for WooCommerce Help and Support, you should take a look at our list of WooCommerce Forums and Groups for Peer to Peer WooCommerce Support.

If you’re considering outsourcing your next project, you should take a look at our Done For Your Websites service. We build eCommerce stores for entrepreneurs who want to get back to running their business, not coding their website!

FAQs

How do I disable WooCommerce shopping cart?

The quickest and easiest way to disable WooCommerce shopping cart is to switch all products to “External / Affiliate” products – this means no products can be added to cart.

Alternatively if you temporarily want to disable WooCommerce shopping cart, switching off all payment methods on your WooCommerce store will prevent users from being able to checkout.

Some themes have a WooCommerce Catalog Mode option built in which you can enable, which then disables the cart and checkout. Alternatively there are plugins which allow you to enable Catalog Mode – such as WooCommerce Catalog Mode by Yith

How do I edit and disable checkout fields in WooCommerce?

We recommend using a top class plugin from one of the best plugin developers in the WooCommerce space to edit checkout fields and the whole checkout process.

Learn more about editing WooCommerce Checkout here.

How do I enable checkout in WooCommerce?

If you’ve setup your products in WooCommerce as External / Affiliate products, to enable these to be added to cart, you need to change these products to “simple product” type. If you’ve disabled WooCommerce Checkout by switching on Catalog mode with a Plugin or your Theme, go to your Catalog Mode Plugin or Theme settings and switch off catalog mode.

Here’s that link to the Atelier Theme which does have catalog mode.

If you’ve disabled all payment methods in WooCommerce to disable the WooCommerce checkout, re-enable at least one payment method in WooCommerce and your checkout will become active once again.