A Guide to the woocommerce_thankyou Action

Have you ever wanted to add a custom message or some bespoke functionality to the “thank you” WooCommerce page that appears after a customer has paid for and checked out their order? If you have then the woocommerce_thankyou action is probably exactly what you are looking for.

In this blog post we’ll take a look at how you can use the woocommerce_thankyou action to add custom text or functionality to the WooCommerce thank you page.

When Does the WooCommerce woocommerce_thankyou Action Fire?

The woocommerce_thankyou action fires on the thank you page which is shown directly after the user has completed the WooCommerce checkout process.

Here’s a screen grab of the thank you page from a WooCommerce store running the Storefront child theme

The action is fired by this call

<?php do_action( 'woocommerce_thankyou', $order->get_id() ); ?>

which is made  from the thankyou.php template file, which you should be able to find in the wp-content/plugins/woocommerce/templates/checkout directory of the WooCommerce plugin folder.

A Simple Code Snippet that uses the woocommerce_thankyou Action

Here is some PHP code that uses the woocommerce_thankyou action

function hwn_add_thankyou_custom_text() {
    echo "This is some custom text added by a function hooked to the 'woocommerce_thankyou' action.";
}

add_action( 'woocommerce_thankyou', 'hwn_add_thankyou_custom_text' );

The code creates a function named hwn_add_thankyou_custom_text that echoes out a value, the code then hooks this function to the woocommerce_thankyou action via the add_action function.

Once the code has been added to your WooCommerce site, then the text that was echoed in the snippet should show on the thank you page.

As you can see from the image above the text that was added appears just underneath the order summary on the thank you page.

How to Access the Order Details via the woocommerce_thankyou Action

Whilst outputting a message to the screen is useful, you may want to include some specific details about the customer’s order in the message. When WooCommerce triggers the woocommerce_thankyou action it passes in the order id, so we can pass this id to the wc_get_order function in order to create an object that contains details about the order.

You can see how this is done in the snippet below

function hwn_add_thankyou_custom_text_with_order_details($order_id) {

    $order = wc_get_order( $order_id );

    echo "This is some custom text added by a function hooked to the 'woocommerce_thankyou' action.<br>";
    echo "The billing address postcode for the order is  " . $order-> get_billing_postcode() . ".";
}

add_action( 'woocommerce_thankyou', 'hwn_add_thankyou_custom_text_with_order_details' );

Whilst it’s unlikely that many real life situations would call for a thank you message that informs the buyer about their own postcode, the code snippet hopefully gives you an idea of how you can access the order object from the woocommerce_thankyou action.

Here’s an image showing the updated message that includes the post (or zip) code details linked to the order

How to fire the woocommerce_thankyou Action for a Specific Payment Gateway

As well as the  woocommerce_thankyou action, WooCommerce also fires another, similar action hook on the thank you page woocommerce_thankyou_<payment method>. 

This hook can be used to display a message that will only appear if an order has been paid for using a specific payment gateway, here’s an example that would display a message if an order had been paid for using WooCommerce’s built in “cash on delivery” payment method

function hwn_add_thankyou_custom_text_for_orders_paid_with_cash_on_delivery() {
    echo "Some text that will only display for cash on delivery orders.<br>";
}

add_action( 'woocommerce_thankyou_cod', 'hwn_add_thankyou_custom_text_for_orders_paid_with_cash_on_delivery');

Once the code above is added to your WooCommerce site, the custom message below will be displayed but only when the order has been paid for using the “cash on delivery” payment gateway

Can the woocommerce_thankyou Action be used to Redirect the user away from the Thank you page?

Because the woocommerce_thankyou action fires during the rendering of the thank you page content it is not the ideal choice of hook to redirect the user away from the thank you page.

Having said that, if you want to show the user the thank you page and then redirect them to another page, the code snippet below will print a message on the thank you page stating that the user is about to be redirected and then redirect them to another website

add_action( 'woocommerce_thankyou', 'hwn_javascript_redirect_from_the_thankyou_hook', 10, 1 );

function hwn_javascript_redirect_from_the_thankyou_hook(){
    echo '<p>Thanks for your order you will be redirected to the woocommerce.com site in 7 seconds.</p>';
    $link_redirect  = 'https://woocommerce.com/';
    ?>
    <script>
        document.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', function() {
            setTimeout(function(){
                window.location.href = '<?php echo $link_redirect; ?>';
            }, 7000);
        });
    </script>
<?php
}

The code above does the following

• Outputs a message to the screen telling the user that they are about to be redirected
• Defines the $link_redirect variable that contains the URL the user will be redirected to
• Renders some JavaScript to redirect the user, the JavaScript hooks a function to the DOMContentLoaded event that redirects the user away from the thank you page. JavaScript’s setTimeout function is used to delay the redirection by 7000 milliseconds (7 seconds)

If you did want to redirect the user away from the thank you page before the  woocommerce_thankyou action fires you could use the template_redirect hook to accomplish the task in a different way , here’s some sample code that uses the template redirect hook to divertthe user away from the thank you page if they have used the “cash on delivery” payment method

add_action( 'template_redirect', 'hwn_redirect_user_away_from_the_thankyou_page_if_paying_cash_on_delivery' );

function hwn_redirect_user_away_from_the_thankyou_page_if_paying_cash_on_delivery (){

    if( !is_wc_endpoint_url( 'order-received' ) || empty( $_GET['key'] ) ) {
        return;
    }
    
    $order_id = wc_get_order_id_by_order_key( $_GET['key'] );
    $order = wc_get_order( $order_id );

    $link_redirect  = 'https://woocommerce.com/';

    if( 'cod' == $order->get_payment_method() ) {
        wp_redirect( $link_redirect );
        exit;
    }
}

The code begins by assigning the hwn_redirect_user_away_from_the_thankyou_page_if_paying_cash_on_delivery function to the template_redirect function

The hwn_redirect_user_away_from_the_thankyou_page_if_paying_cash_on_delivery function does the following

• Uses the is_wc_endpoint_urlfunction to check that we are being redirected to the thank you page, it also checks that there is value present in the key query string variable, if either of these checks return false then the function aborts
• Uses wc_get_order_id_by_order_key function to return an order id linked to the current order
• Uses the wc_get_order function to create an order object with order details of the current order
• It then uses the get_payment_method() function to check that the order was paid for using “cash on delivery” if this check returns true then it redirects the user away from the thank you page.