Conditional Shipping & Payment Rules for WooCommerce — show shipping and payment methods by condition

Conditional Shipping & Payment Rules for WooCommerce shows each customer only the shipping methods and payment gateways that actually fit them. WooCommerce offers everything that matches the shipping zone. A real shop needs less than that: no cash on delivery for guests, courier for one city only, no pickup for a heavy basket, one delivery option for wholesale accounts, its own option for a school or a dealer that arrives through its own link.

The plugin turns that into rules you can read: hide (or keep only) these shipping methods or these payment gateways when the cart and the customer look like this.

What the customer sees

The customer sees nothing special — and that is the point. They simply get a shorter, correct list. They change the city and the shipping list updates without a page reload. They pick the courier and cash on delivery disappears. They pick cash on delivery and local pickup disappears, if that is how you set it up.

• Guests and customers with an account see different sets: for example, cash on delivery only for people who already bought and have an account.
• A school, a dealer, a partner. Your site sets a cookie when someone arrives through their own link, and at checkout they see only their own delivery option. This is exactly the request the plugin started from.
• A hidden method cannot be forced through. Paying with a hidden gateway through a request that bypasses the page returns an error on the block checkout and no order is created. On the classic checkout WooCommerce answers “Invalid payment method”.

What the admin gets

A separate page, WooCommerce → Shipping & payment rules. Each rule is a card: what to do, with which methods, under which conditions.

• Two actions: “Hide” removes the chosen methods, “Keep only” removes everything except them.
• A whole method or one instance in a zone: hide “Flat rate” in every zone or in one zone only.
• Priority: rules run from the lowest number up, and each one only narrows the list. A later rule cannot bring back what an earlier one removed, so the result is easy to predict.
• “All conditions” or “any” — per rule. An empty condition is simply not checked.
• Log: every decision goes to WooCommerce → Status → Logs, so you can see why a method showed up or not.
• Manual orders in the admin are not touched by the rules: the manager sees every method.

How it works, step by step

1. The customer opens the cart or the checkout. WooCommerce calculates the shipping methods available for their address.
2. The plugin takes a snapshot: role, the cookies your rules read, address, weight, item count, total, categories and shipping classes in the cart, the chosen gateway or shipping method, today’s date in the store’s time zone.
3. Rules run in priority order. Each rule whose conditions match hides its methods or keeps only them.
4. If no method is left and the guard is on, the customer gets the full list back and a warning goes to the log.
5. The classic checkout and the block checkout through the Store API get the same result.
6. The customer changes the city, a cookie or a method, and WooCommerce recalculates the rates, because the plugin puts everything the rules read into the shipping package fingerprint. An old list never gets stuck in the cache.

Under the hood

• The shipping-rate cache. WooCommerce caches calculated rates in the session under a hash of the shipping package. Everything a rule reads that is not in that package (role, cookies, chosen gateway, date, the rules themselves, licence state) goes into the package as one extra key. The cache is invalidated exactly when the answer changes, and never more often. This is where similar plugins trip: the customer changed a condition but still sees the old list.
• Block checkout and payments. On the block checkout the list of gateways is assembled in the browser, so a PHP filter alone is not enough. PHP makes the decision and sends it along with the Store API cart; the plugin’s script applies it on the page.
• Cross conditions “payment by shipping” and “shipping by payment” work on both checkouts; their scripts are loaded only when such a rule actually exists.
• An honest free tier. A rule that relies on a Pro condition is skipped entirely on Free rather than run without it. Otherwise “no courier for Hamburg” would turn into “no courier for anyone” after the trial.
• Nothing extra in the database: no custom tables, settings and rules are two options. Deleting the plugin cleans up after itself.

Installation

1. Plugins → Add New → Upload Plugin: choose conditional-shipping-and-payment-rules-for-woocommerce-1.0.1.zip and activate it.
2. Open WooCommerce → Shipping & payment rules.
3. Add a rule: “Hide” or “Keep only”, shipping methods or payment gateways, conditions. Switch it on and save.
4. Open the checkout in a private window (as a guest) and with an account — check that the list changes the way you intended.
5. For Pro: paste the licence key from the e-mail after payment, or start the 7-day trial with the button on the same page.