How to pay for a WooCommerce order on behalf of a customer (useful for over the phone sales)

In a previous version of WooCommerce, you had the ability to be able to pay for an “over the phone order” on behalf of a customer, by clicking the payment link on the order and typing in the user’s credit card details. This was a really important feature to a number of businesses, especially businesses who take orders over the phone. Unfortunately, the ability to pay for a WooCommerce order is no longer possible. The customers have to pay for the orders themselves.

Unless, of course you use the trick that we’re going to outline in this guide. It unfortunately involves a bit of trickery, but the good news is that here at WP Geeks, we’re busy working on a plugin that will allow you to pay for orders without any hassle. That’ll be ready soon, but until then, use the method below.

Let’s get in to it.

Step 1: Find the order that you would like to pay

Firstly, locate the order that you would like to pay on behalf of the customer. Do this by hovering over the “WooCommerce” tab on the WP Admin sidebar and clicking “Orders”. Scroll through the list, or use the search until you find the order that you need to pay. Click on the order title to go through to the order page. See the screenshot below for an example of what to click.

Step 2: Update the Customer on the order to “Guest”

Now that you’re on the order page, we need to update the order so that WooCommerce thinks that it has been purchased by a guest. This is so that you can avoid having to log in as the customer to make the payment. Under the order details, there is a drop down select box for “Customer”. You’ll see the customer in the select box with a little “x” next to their name on the right hand side. Click that to remove the customer for the order and assign it as a “Guest” order. Be sure to save the order for the changes to persist.

Important note! Make sure you remember who made the order in the first place. It’s a good idea here to write down the order number and customer email address to make sure you can reassign the order to the customer in Step 4.

See below for the select box which you should use to change the order to “Guest”.

Step 3: Open a new Incognito window (allows you to pay for a WooCommerce order)

Now, because you’re logged in to WooCommerce, you won’t be able to pay for a Guest or Customer order. You either need to log out, or do what we prefer, open the payment for the order in a new incognito window in Google Chrome or private window in Safari.

If you don’t know what incognito/private browser windows are, they are basically a new temporary browser window where you act as a completely new internet browser. All your logged in sessions are not carried through to this window and the browser will not track browsing history in this window. It’s perfect for being able to pay for a WooCommerce order assigned to a guest because you will not be logged in to your store when you open it.

Right click the payment link under your order details, and click (for Chrome users) open in new incognito window. Check out this screenshot for an example.

Step 4: Pay for the WooCommerce order

You can now actually pay for the order. Select your payment method (this would usually be a credit card) and type in the details of the customers payment method to pay.

Step 5: Reallocate the order to original customer

Now that the order is paid for, don’t forget to reallocate that order to the customer who actually made it in the first place. We don’t want the order hanging under the Guest account. This is important for tracking purposes and the ability to re-market to your customers. You can do this by doing the same thing that we did in step 2.

Go to the “Customer” drop down box on the order and start typing the name of the customer. Click their name when they come up in the search and save the order.

There we go, that is all there is to it! You can now pay for a WooCommerce order on behalf of your customers. We hope you found this guide useful. Let us know in the comments if you have any questions.