Shop Manager for WooCommerce – AI-Powered Frontend Dashboard & Smart Order, Product & Employee Management

1.3.8

• 🆕 Shipping charges on orders you create. Pick a rate from your WooCommerce shipping zones, or type your own charge.
• 🆕 Coupon codes on orders you create. Choose from your store’s coupons or type a code. It is checked before the order is saved, with WooCommerce’s own reason if it cannot be used.
• 🆕 Tax on orders you create. A Charge tax switch works it out from the delivery address and your tax rates. Off by default, so nothing changes until you turn it on.
• 🆕 Payment Link on the order page. Copy the link your customer pays on and send it however you reach them. They pay on your own checkout, through your own gateway.
• 🐛 Fix: Editing an order wiped its shipping charge and its tax. Totals are now worked out by WooCommerce from what is on the order. Worth checking any checkout orders you edited here.
• 🐛 Fix: Editing an order removed fees other plugins had added, such as gift wrap or a surcharge.
• 🐛 Fix: Editing an order cancelled the discount from a coupon the customer had used.
• 🐛 Fix: An order created in the dashboard was recorded as belonging to the member of staff who typed it, not the customer. The payment link then only worked in that person’s browser, the order appeared in their own account, and reports counted it against them. The order now belongs to the customer it was billed to, or is a guest order when they have no account.
• 🐛 Fix: Saving an order that carried a coupon lowered its prices a little each time.
• 🐛 Fix: Charge tax now stays on when you reopen an order, and turning it off clears the tax.
• 🐛 Fix: The order page breakdown left fees out, so it did not add up to its own total.
• 🐛 Fix: Invoices left fees out of the totals in the same way.
• 🐛 Fix: The low stock threshold, out of stock visibility and the two review settings now use WooCommerce’s own options instead of a private copy.
• 🐛 Fix: Auto SKU Prefix now works. A product saved without an SKU gets the next number, e.g. PROD-0023.
• 🐛 Fix: Manage Stock by Default now applies to products created in Shop Manager.
• 🐛 Fix: Activity Log Retention now runs. A daily job prunes entries older than your chosen 30, 60 or 90 days.
• 🐛 Fix: Employee order counts and the 7 day summary now use the store’s timezone instead of UTC.
• 🐛 Fix: Bulk Upload on the Add Product form now works. It imports simple products from CSV and skips rows whose SKU already exists.
• 🐛 Fix: Collect on delivery now prints on cash on delivery labels, and a COD order no longer shows Paid before the money is in.
• 🐛 Fix: Prices everywhere now follow WooCommerce’s Currency position, before or after the amount.
• ✨ Improvement: The Create Order screen now says where the discount, coupon, shipping and tax controls appear.
• ℹ️ Note: Those four Products settings now come from WooCommerce, so check them once after updating.
• 🆓 Advanced order filters are now free.
• 🧹 Removed the “Unlock Premium Features” popup. Pro controls link to the pricing page.
• 📝 Getting Started no longer mentions a [shop_manager] shortcode. Activation creates the SM Dashboard page for you.
• 📝 Corrected the Free and Pro lists. Order creating/editing, customer tagging, insight cards and customer notes are free.

1.3.7

• ✨ Improvement: The print and label buttons now carry your own Document Title, so a shop that prints “Packing Slip” sees Packing Slip rather than a generic “Print Order”. The icon already says it prints, so the word is not repeated.
• ✨ Improvement: WooCommerce is now declared as a required plugin, so WordPress offers to install it for you and will not let Shop Manager be activated without it.
• 🐛 Fix: Product add-on fields were missing from the order page, packing slips and invoices when the add-on plugin stores them under keys beginning with an underscore, as Product Extras for WooCommerce does. WooCommerce treats those as internal and hides them, so the customer’s engraving text and chosen options never reached the people packing the parcel.

1.3.6

• 🆕 New: Shipping & tracking: record the carrier and tracking number on any order, with 151 couriers across 55 countries built in, plus a Custom carrier option.
• 🆕 New: Shipping labels with a scannable Code 128 barcode, in A4, A5, 4×6 inch, 80 mm and 58 mm thermal roll.
• 🆕 New: Barcode scanning: a Scan panel built for USB scanners that finds an order and can move it to any status as you scan.
• 🆕 New: Choose which couriers you ship with under Shipping → Carriers, so staff pick from your list instead of all 151.
• 🆕 New: Filter the orders list by carrier, beside Shipping Method in Advanced Filters.
• 🆕 New: Order search now finds orders by tracking number.
• 🆕 New: Packing slips can print the carrier and tracking number.
• 🆕 New: Cash on delivery amounts print on the label as a Collect on delivery band, and clear once payment is recorded.
• 🆕 New: Tracking details can be added to WooCommerce order emails and My Account. Advanced Shipment Tracking is detected, so customers are never told twice.
• 🆕 New: Shipping settings tab, with a live preview of the label as you change it.
• 🆕 New: “Shipping & Tracking” permission under Employees → Roles & Access, and the whole module can be switched off from the Modules tab.
• 🆕 New: Orders created from the dashboard now record who created them, shown as “Created: name” in the list and in the order’s history.
• ✨ Improvement: Bulk tracking entry: set the carrier and ship date once, then type numbers against order numbers.
• ✨ Improvement: The analytics dashboard has been redesigned around one colour palette that also works in dark mode.
• ✨ Improvement: Total Orders now states how many cancelled and refunded orders it leaves out.
• ✨ Improvement: Product dropdowns across the dashboard search in the database and load as you scroll, so the whole catalogue is reachable on a large shop.
• ✨ Improvement: The products page shows how many products match the current filters, next to its title.
• ✨ Improvement: Export on the products page asks before downloading, and says how many rows it will write.
• ✨ Improvement: Finding an order by tracking number went from about 520ms to 0.36ms on a 100,000 order store.
• ✨ Improvement: The settings menu groups Orders, Invoice, Print Order and Shipping together.
• 🐛 Fix: Editing an order could delete every line item on it when the update did not resend the full basket.
• 🐛 Fix: Changing an order’s status could fail with a memory error on a customer with a long order history.
• 🐛 Fix: The dashboard failed to load on stores with a lot of orders. The figures are now calculated by the database.
• 🐛 Fix: The customer list and customer profile could take close to a minute to load, or run out of memory.
• 🐛 Fix: Typing in the product picker on Add Order or Edit Order blanked the whole page.
• 🐛 Fix: The product picker kept the previous search after an item was added.
• 🐛 Fix: Searching for an order by its number stopped working once a store passed 99,999 orders.
• 🐛 Fix: The search REST endpoint returned a fatal error on every call.
• 🐛 Fix: Staff allowed to create orders but not to manage products saw an empty product list on Add Order.
• 🐛 Fix: Shipping labels and the Scan panel ignored the Shipping & Tracking permission.
• 🐛 Fix: The AI assistant panel loaded for employees without AI access and showed a permission error on every page.
• 🐛 Fix: Panels, dialogs and toast messages ignored your appearance colours, dark mode worst of all.
• 🐛 Fix: A product’s sale price was only saved when a regular price was sent with it.
• 🐛 Fix: Approving a review that was already approved reported a failure.
• 🐛 Fix: Product names containing an apostrophe or a quote showed raw HTML in the products list.
• 🐛 Fix: The Shipping Method filter listed “Local pickup” twice.
• 🐛 Fix: Packing slips printed a “Shipping method” row with nothing in it, on orders created from the dashboard.
• 🐛 Fix: Two custom-field REST routes were registered with no code behind them and have been removed.

1.3.5

• 🔒 Security: Custom employee roles were treated as administrators by the frontend dashboard. A role created in Employees → Roles & Access, a “Driver” allowed only to view orders and change their status, say, saw the entire sidebar and every page, button and action in it, because only the four built-in roles were recognised as employee roles; anyone holding a custom role fell through to the “no restrictions” path. Custom roles are now recognised, so every role sees exactly what it was granted.
• 🔒 Security: The dashboard statistics endpoint (store revenue, order and customer counts, top products) was reachable by any employee role, whether or not that role was allowed to see the dashboard. It now requires dashboard or reports access, like the rest of the dashboard.
• 🔒 Security: The settings endpoint returned the complete plugin settings to every employee role, including the encrypted AI provider API key and the capability matrix of every role. Employees now receive only the settings the dashboard actually renders; administrators are unaffected.
• 🔒 Security: An employee’s role is now resolved by matching against the Shop Manager roles rather than by reading whichever role happens to be first on the account, so an employee who also holds another WordPress role can no longer skip the employee permission checks.
• 🔒 Security: The WordPress admin bar is no longer shown to employees on the frontend. They were already redirected out of wp-admin, so it only offered links back to a screen they cannot open.
• 🐛 Fix: A role granted only “View Reports” had nowhere to go. Reports are widgets on the dashboard page, which is gated by “View Dashboard”, so SM: Accountant, and any custom role set up the same way, landed on “Access Restricted” with an empty sidebar. Roles holding a reports capability now also have dashboard access, and Roles & Access nests View Reports and Export Reports underneath View Dashboard so the dead combination can no longer be created.
• 🐛 Fix: SM: Fulfillment Staff and SM: Store Manager held every order capability but got no Orders menu. The built-in roles carried the original coarse capabilities while the sidebar and routes check the newer per-section access capabilities. Updating grants the matching access capability to any role that needs it; the change only ever adds capabilities, so permissions you have edited yourself are left exactly as they are.
• 🐛 Fix: The customer name on the order details page opened the WordPress user editor in wp-admin, which sent you out of the dashboard entirely, and led employees to a screen they are redirected away from. It now opens that customer in the dashboard’s own Customers section, and both it and the Order Count beside it now take their colour from your Appearance colour combination, the same way product names in the item list already did, with an arrow on the customer name, so it is clear which values in the card can be opened. On a guest order, or for a role without customer access, the name is shown as plain text instead of a dead link.
• 🐛 Fix: Roles & Access listed the built-in roles’ permissions from a hardcoded copy instead of the roles themselves, so the checkboxes could disagree with the permissions actually in force, and because the editor saves every checkbox, opening and saving a role could silently strip a capability from it. The screen now reads the live role.
• ✨ Improvement: Order actions respond the moment you click them. Changing a status, or trashing, restoring or deleting an order, now puts the orders table into its loading state immediately; previously nothing at all happened on screen until the request came back, which on a status change that sends a customer email can be several seconds. (The remaining wait is WooCommerce sending that email inside the request: WooCommerce’s own Deferred transactional emails feature, under WooCommerce → Settings → Advanced → Features, moves it to the background.)
• ✨ Improvement: The order details page now refreshes itself after a status change, with the same in-place loading overlay the orders table uses. Payment Details, Order Timeline, the status tag and the “updated by” line previously kept showing pre-change data until the page was reloaded, because only the status was patched in locally.
• ✨ Improvement: The order status tabs (All Orders, Processing, Completed and the rest) now recount after an action moves an order between statuses. They were loaded once per page view, so the numbers went stale as soon as you changed anything.
• ✨ Improvement: Changing an order’s status writes the order once instead of twice, and a half-second delay that had been hardcoded into the move-to-trash action has been removed.

1.3.4

• 🆕 New: Print orders. A Print button on the order details page, a Print action in the orders list row menu, and a Print Orders bulk action open a clean, print-ready sheet in a new tab and hand it to your browser’s print dialog: no PDF plugin or Pro licence required. Bulk printing puts one order per page in a single document.
• 🆕 New: Print settings tab. Choose the document title (Order, Packing Slip, Delivery Note), paper size, accent colour and logo; set your store name, address, phone and email: each falls back to your WordPress and WooCommerce settings when left blank; and toggle every section: order status, payment and shipping method, billing and shipping addresses, product images, SKU, item meta, prices, totals, customer note, internal notes and footer text. Turn prices off to print a packing slip with quantities only.
• 🆕 New: “Print Order” permission under Employees → Roles & Access, so you can let fulfilment staff print without granting invoice access. Order Printing can also be switched off entirely from the Modules tab.
• ✨ Improvement: Company details are asked for once, not twice. Invoice and Print Order both treat their company fields as overrides: leave one empty and it uses your WooCommerce store details, so an invoice and its packing slip can no longer drift apart. Each field’s placeholder now shows the exact value that will be printed, with a link straight to your WooCommerce settings.
• ✨ Improvement: Print Order now offers the same three colours as invoices: Primary (heading, rules, section labels), Accent/Bg (table header background) and Body Text, plus the same eight palette presets, so a packing slip can carry the palette you already picked for invoices. An existing accent colour is carried over to Primary automatically.
• ✨ Improvement: The Invoice and Print Order settings screens now use the same tab names, icons and order (Company, General, Content, Colors, Footer), so what you learn on one applies to the other. Invoice adds a Template tab. Item-table options moved into Content, since they are part of what the document shows.
• ✨ Improvement: Settings menu reordered so related screens sit together: Orders, Invoice and Print Order now run in sequence and are visually connected in the sidebar, followed by Products, Customer and the rest. The Modules tab groups the same three under an “Order Management” heading.
• 🐛 Fix: Invoices printed “Your Company Name” and “123 Business St” to customers when the Invoice → Company section was left empty. Company name, address, phone and email now fall back to your WordPress site title and WooCommerce store details instead of placeholder text.
• 🆕 New: Invoices now carry a Payment Status tag, green for Paid and red for Unpaid, matching the tag the dashboard shows on the order screen, and it can be switched off under Invoice → Content. The invoice meta block was reordered to Order, Order Created, Payment Status, Payment Method, and then Payment Date on a settled order or Due Date on an outstanding one. All four templates show the same rows.
• 🐛 Fix: The invoice due date was hardcoded to 14 days after the order, whatever your terms said, so an invoice could read “payment is due within 30 days” and print a fourteen-day due date next to it. Days until due is now a setting under Invoice → General → Payment Terms (default 14, so nothing changes unless you change it).
• 🐛 Fix: Invoices printed bank-transfer details on orders that were already paid. Payment Information now appears only while an order still needs paying, controlled by Invoice → Footer → Show Payment Info (Only when unpaid / Always / Never). This is separate from the order’s payment method, which has always been read from the order itself.
• ✨ Improvement: Payment Information left empty now uses the accounts from WooCommerce → Payments → Direct bank transfer, so your account number or IBAN is entered once, not twice.
• 🐛 Fix: Turning off “Product Add-ons & Options” in Invoice settings never stuck, the setting was dropped when saving, so it reappeared switched on after a reload and invoices kept printing the item details.

1.3.3

• 🆕 New: Product add-on and personalisation fields now show in order details. Any data a third-party add-on plugin writes to a line item, customer-entered names, uploaded artwork, selected options, appears in the order page, in the expandable row on the Orders list, and on the invoice PDF. Previously only variation attributes were shown, so everything else was dropped. This works with WooCommerce Product Add-Ons Ultimate, Gravity Forms Product Add-Ons, Checkout Field Editor and any other plugin that stores line item meta, because Shop Manager now renders it through WooCommerce’s own formatter rather than a fixed list of keys.
• 🆕 New: “Product Add-ons & Options” toggle under Invoice → Columns controls whether those item details are printed on the invoice and packing slip. On by default.
• 🐛 Fix: Editing an order no longer destroys product add-on data. Saving an order from the dashboard, even a change to nothing but the shipping address, deleted and recreated every line item, which permanently discarded all add-on, personalisation and subscription meta attached to them. Line items are now updated in place, and only items you actually remove are deleted.
• 🐛 Fix: Line item details were hidden on simple products. The order page only rendered item meta for variable products, so personalised options on a simple product were invisible even when present.
• 🐛 Fix: Removing the discount from an order left an orphaned fee row behind in some cases; fee items are now removed through the order object so the change is written correctly.