How to Hide a Shipping Method for Product Category

In this guide, you will learn two ways of how you can enable or disable WooCommerce shipping methods depending on products from a specific category in the customer’s cart or an order.

First, I will show you how to easily add conditions with a plugin, and then we will also take a look at a programmatic approach.

Disable a Specific Shipping Method for a Product Category Using a Plugin (Recommended)

Here, we will use the Simple Conditional Shipping and Payments for WooCommerce plugin to create conditions in your store settings.

Creating a condition for a shipping method and a product category is quite simple: all you need to do is to visit WooCommerce > Settings > Conditions > Shipping conditions, then create a new conditional rule, and inside that rule, create a new “Product category” child condition.

An example of the conditional rule settings is in the screenshot below:

Having multiple products under the shared product category (or we can use a product tag, or a product brand, by the way) simplifies things a little bit when we need to have conditional rules for many different products at the same time. Without using a product category or a product tag, we would need to create multiple conditional rules, kind of like this:

Can we use conditional rules like this? Of course, we can, but having a product category or a product tag seems to be a much more convenient way to handle things here.

A Programmatic Way of Hiding a Shipping Method for Category

As usual, I won’t leave you without a working code snippet which you can use in your WooCommerce store as it is. By the way, if you don’t know how, there is a guide about it.

/**
 * @snippet WooCommerce Hide a Shipping Method for a Product Category
 * @author Misha Rudrastyh
 * @url https://rudrastyh.com/woocommerce/hide-shipping-method-for-product-category.html
 */
add_filter( 'woocommerce_package_rates', 'rudr_no_local_pickup_if_product_cat' );

function rudr_no_local_pickup_if_product_cat( $rates ) {

	$product_cat = 20;
	$taxonomy = 'product_cat'; // you can use 'product_tag' for product tags or 'product_brand' for brands

	foreach( WC()->cart->get_cart_contents() as $cart_item ) {
		if( has_term( $product_cat, $taxonomy, $cart_item[ 'data' ]->get_id() ) ) {

			foreach( $rates as $rate_id => $rate ) {
				if( str_starts_with( $rate_id, 'local_pickup' ) ) {
					unset( $rates[ $rate_id ] );
				}
			}
			break;
		}
	}

	return $rates;
}

As you can see in the code above, some things are hard-coded there:

• $product_cat – here I provided a product category ID. You need to find it in your WooCommerce admin dashboard. You can use slugs, if you want, but then you might add the get_term_by() function into the code snippet to extract a product category ID from its slug anyway.
• $taxonomy – you need to use a taxonomy slug here, for WooCommerce, the common ones are product_cat (Categories), product_tag (Tags), product_brand (Brands). Of course, if you decide to apply it to regular WordPress categories, you will need to use category.
• local_pickup – using it in combination with the str_starts_with() PHP function allows us to apply the condition for local pickup shipping method in any shipping zone. But usually, the shipping method ID comes with a number, like local_pickup:4 or flat_rate:5.

Also, keep in mind that the code snippet here is quite simplified, and it doesn’t apply to scenarios when a customer wants to pay for an order via the “My account” page. Don’t forget to check is_wc_endpoint_url( 'order-pay' ) in your code snippet to code different logic for situations like that, or just use the plugin approach where everything is already in place.

# WooCommerce, Shipping

Misha Rudrastyh

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