PluginCity Product Expiry Dates for WooCommerce

WooCommerce will keep selling a product, long after it should have stopped being available to buy. In this tutorial, we'll give products an expiry date, so they come off sale on their own. We'll use the free PluginCity Product Expiry Dates plugin, and test everything as a customer.

This is Summer Blend, a seasonal coffee. It was only meant to be sold until October 31. WooCommerce has no setting for that, so the Add to cart button is still here. A customer can add it to the cart, and carry on to checkout. Nothing in a standard shop stops the sale.

Let's fix that. In your dashboard, go to Plugins, then Add Plugin. Search for PluginCity Product Expiry Dates for WooCommerce. Find the plugin by PluginCity, click Install Now, then Activate. It's free, and there's no license key to enter.

The settings live under WooCommerce, then Product Expiry. At the top, a note says expiry dates are switched on, but no product has a date yet, so nothing is being stopped. That's the plugin reminding you that nothing is happening yet. The dates themselves are entered on each product.

Open a product, for example Sunrise Blend. Under Product data, click the new Expiry tab. Type the last day the product can be sold. Let's use December 31. The time is optional. Leave it empty, and the product sells until the end of that day. Fill it in, and it stops at that minute. Dates follow your store's time zone, from Settings, General. Click Update to save it.

Now open the Products list. There's a new column, called Expires. It shows every date in one place. Summer Blend's date has passed, so it's in red, and marked No longer on sale. Harvest Blend has a time as well, six pm today. A date without a time shows eleven fifty nine pm, which is the end of that day.

Back in the settings, the yellow note has gone, because products now have dates. Next, open Messages. This is what your customers read. The first box is labeled In the basket, but it's the sentence shown in the cart and at checkout. Write percent S where the product names should go. Let's use our own words, and say cart. The second box, On the product, replaces the Add to cart button on an expired product. Bold, italics and links are allowed in both. Anything else is stripped out.

Under Display, you can switch the cart message on or off, and the checkout message too. An expired product is refused either way. These switches only decide where the customer reads about it. At the top, Use expiry dates is the master switch. Untick it, and nothing is stopped. Click Save changes. Import and export, below, copies these settings to another shop.

Now let's be the customer. A product that hasn't expired sells as normal. By default, the date isn't shown on the page. To show it, add the shortcode pexp_message, with show equals product, to the product description. Now the page says, Available until December 31, 2026.

Now Summer Blend, whose date has passed. On the shop page, its button says Read more, instead of Add to cart. It stays listed, so a customer who follows an old link lands on a page that explains itself. On its own page, the buy button is gone, and our sentence takes its place. It isn't marked out of stock, so your reports and feeds stay truthful. To hide expired products, or move them to draft, you would need Pro.

Dates can run out while a product is already in a cart. Harvest Blend stops at six pm today. It's half past three on the demo shop clock, so a customer can still add it. Now I'll move the demo shop clock to five past six. The cart explains itself. WooCommerce shows its own error at the top, and our message sits beside the totals. The product isn't removed behind the customer's back. It stays in the cart, so they can see why. If they carry on anyway, the order is refused, and the error names the product. Take it out, and the rest of the cart checks out as normal. Orders already placed are never changed.

There's also a Pro version, and the free plugin lists what it adds. Pro can warn you before a date passes, take expired products out of the shop, let staff and trade accounts buy anyway, and set dates in bulk. Everything else in this video is free.

That's it. Install the free plugin from Plugins, Add Plugin, and give your first product an expiry date. Search for PluginCity Product Expiry Dates for WooCommerce. Thanks for watching.