WooCommerce: Dates, Times & Timezones

Warning: Timezones are the worst and your head may explode reading this. I know mine did writing it.

You may notice some dates incorrect in Metorik if at one point in the past you changed your store's timezone.

WooCommerce does not update the time on past orders to reflect your store's current timezone, while Metorik does.

How about an example to make more sense of this?

It's January 22nd 2016. Your store's timezone is UTC.

An order comes in that day at 10:00 AM UTC.

Your store is actually in Melbourne, Australia, so when that order came in, it was 6:00 PM Melbourne/Australia time.

Months later, you realise that you had neglected to set your store's timezone up until this point. You change it in the WordPress General Settings to UTC+10 , the timezone for Melbourne/Australia. So any orders made now will reflect the new time.

You look back at the order from January 22nd 2016 and the time is still set to 10:00 AM UTC even though it should say 6:00 PM.

But when you go to Metorik, it's displaying correctly at 6:00 PM. For the technically-minded, this is because we store all dates in UTC time, rather than the timezone your store was set to at the time.

This can have some side effects, like if you want to see the time an old order happened in the timezone your store was set to at the time. In those cases, check WooCommerce.