WooCommerce: Order Date Types

Video

Metorik lets you choose the date type to use for filtering in your store's date settings page. The options for this are currently:

Created
Paid
Completed

Why would you use one over the other? Well, that's completely up to you.

In WooCommerce, all orders have a created date, which is the moment that the order is made and stored in your system. Now, even if that order was never completed and paid for, it was still created, so you're able to filter based on when the order was created.

The paid date is when the order is marked as paid in WooCommerce. If an order was started by a customer at 11pm one evening, but something went wrong during the payment or they took a while to complete it, and only paid a couple hours later at 1am the next day, the paid date would be the following day.

The completed date is when the order is marked as completed. You may have a payment method or plugin that automatically marks orders as completed after a payment or certain action has been made, or you may manually set it as completed. When using this date filter, it will only be able to filter orders with a completed date, so you risk excluding orders that haven't been completed yet but should be included reports.

Now, why would you not always choose Paid? Well, WooCommerce doesn’t always mark an order as paid. For a number of reasons, like PayPal/Stripe not telling them about a payment, something temporarily breaking, or a payment method that doesn’t record it, it may not know that the order was 100% paid and should be considered as paid. If you were to filter orders by the paid date, those orders without a paid date (but that were actually paid for) would be excluded.