How To Set Up Local Pickup on Your WooCommerce Store

BOPIS stands for Buy Online, Pick Up in Store and with the current coronavirus pandemic forcing retail stores to close their doors and consumers need to keep social distancing for safety, in-store local pickup has become vital for many businesses to survive.

The WooCommerce Local Pickup shipping method allows shop owners to offer in-store pickup to their customers. But, WooCommerce treats local pickup orders the same as orders that you ship to customers and when a local pickup order is ready, your customers will receive the same order confirmation email as if the order was shipped.

WooCommerce doesn’t offer a built-in option to have a custom email subject, header and to add pickup instructions when it’s a local pickup order.

We developed the Advanced Local Pickup (ALP) plugin to help WooCommerce businesses to continue to succeed during these uncertain times and to provide a better shopping experience to their customers.

The ALP plugin provides a complete solution to manage the fulfilment flow of local pickup orders, it adds 2 custom order statuses for the local pickup orders flow, it allows you to add address, business hours, and special instructions to the order that are Ready To Pickup and to customize the pickup instruction display on the order email that customers accounts.

WooCommerce Orders management flow diagram with the custom Local Pickup orders flow

Example of the Ready for Pickup order email sent to the customers:

After a customer has selected to pick up their order and completed their purchase, you can mark the order status as “Ready for Pickup” and the email notification with the pickup instructions will be sent to your customer. When a customer is picking up their order, you can change its status to Picked up.