Save carts, manage vacation shipping, understand customer activity,
and protect checkout while you’re away. 🏝️

Running a WooCommerce store while you’re away doesn’t always have to mean choosing between keeping everything open or completely stopping orders.

Sometimes you may want customers to continue browsing and building their carts. You may still want to accept orders but offer different shipping options. Or you may simply want customers to see that you’re away while allowing them to purchase normally.

Store Vacation Pro 1.7.0 expands those possibilities with Save Cart for Later, flexible vacation shipping, vacation activity reports, Checkout Protection, clearer store status information, and more control over how your store behaves during a vacation.

Let’s take a look at what’s new.

Let Customers Save Their Cart for Later

Store Vacation Pro already lets you use Allow Cart Building to keep products available while checkout is temporarily disabled. Customers can continue browsing your store and prepare an order even though they cannot complete it yet. Version 1.7.0 takes this a step further with Save Cart for Later.

Customers can save their current cart using a secure link and return to it when they’re ready to complete their purchase. Instead of leaving the store and potentially losing the products they selected, they can copy or bookmark the link and restore the cart later. Logged-in customers can also choose to have their saved-cart link sent to their email address.

This can be particularly useful for longer vacation periods. A customer might discover your store while you’re away, build an order, and then return to the same cart after normal checkout becomes available again.

You can decide how the feature should appear to customers. The saved-cart link and email option can be enabled independently, the button text can be customized, and an optional item count can show how many products are currently being saved.

There is also a dedicated Save Cart block and shortcode, making it possible to place the action in custom Cart layouts or other pages.

Getting started: Go to WooCommerce → Settings → Store Vacation → Behavior, enable Allow Cart Building, and turn on the Save Cart options you want to offer.

Adjust Shipping While You’re Away

A temporary change to your store doesn’t necessarily mean that all shipping methods should continue working exactly as they normally do. Perhaps you can still accept orders but cannot offer next-day delivery. Maybe Local Pickup is unavailable while your physical location is closed. Or you want to clearly tell customers that orders placed during your vacation will be dispatched later.

Store Vacation Pro 1.7.0 introduces two new ways to handle these situations.

Hide Shipping Methods During Specific Closures

Schedules and recurring Weekday closures can now hide selected WooCommerce shipping methods while they are active. For example, while you’re away you could temporarily remove Express Delivery, Next-Day Shipping, and Local Pickup while leaving Standard Shipping available.

When the vacation ends, the normal WooCommerce shipping methods become available again automatically. This also means different closures can have different shipping behavior. A weekend closure might disable Local Pickup, while a longer annual vacation could disable both Local Pickup and Express Delivery.

Getting started: Edit a Schedule or Weekday closure and select the shipping methods you want Store Vacation to hide while that closure is active.

Offer Dedicated Vacation Shipping Options

You can now create unlimited Vacation Shipping Options specifically for orders placed while your store is operating under vacation conditions.

Each option can have its own:

• Shipping name
• Cost
• Applicable shipping zones
• Customer-facing checkout description
• Order email description
• Free Shipping behavior

You can also control when each option should be available. A Vacation Shipping Option can apply to every closure or only selected Schedules or recurring Weekday closures.

For example, instead of disabling checkout for a one-week holiday, you could continue taking orders with:

Vacation Shipping — £4.99
Orders placed during our vacation will be dispatched when we return.

Customers can see the additional information directly at checkout before placing their order, and you can optionally include the same information in WooCommerce order emails.

Vacation Shipping Options can also defer to WooCommerce Free Shipping. If an order qualifies for free delivery, your vacation-specific method can automatically stay out of the way.

Getting started: Open WooCommerce → Settings → Store Vacation → Vacation Shipping, create an option, and choose which closures and shipping zones it should apply to.

Together, Vacation Shipping Options and Hide Shipping Methods give you much more control over fulfillment without requiring you to completely stop accepting orders.

See What Customers Do During a Vacation

Until now, it could be difficult to know what customers were actually doing while your vacation settings were active. Were people still adding products to their carts? Which products were getting the most interest? Were customers completing orders when checkout remained available?

The new Vacation Reports help answer those questions. When reporting is enabled, Store Vacation can record customer activity that happens during active vacation periods, including:

• Products added to the cart
• Products removed from the cart
• Quantity changes
• Saved-cart emails
• Completed checkouts
• Shipping methods affected by vacation settings
• Checkout Protection activity

The Reports dashboard gives you an overview of that activity with summary cards for total events, completed checkouts, revenue, and unique customers. You can also explore an Activity Over Time chart, recent customer activity, and the products receiving the most attention during your vacation periods.

Reports can be filtered by date range and individual vacation period, making it easier to compare what happened during different closures. For example, you might discover that customers continue building carts heavily during a short closure even though checkout is unavailable. That could make Save Cart for Later particularly valuable for your store. Or you might find that keeping checkout available with Vacation Shipping still generates meaningful revenue while you’re away.

Recent Activity can also be exported to CSV if you want to analyze the data elsewhere. Reporting is completely optional, and you can choose how long Store Vacation keeps the recorded information.

Getting started: Enable Record Cart Interactions under WooCommerce → Settings → Store Vacation → Behavior. The Reports section will then become available.

Add an Extra Layer of Checkout Protection

Being away from work can also mean spending less time watching your WooCommerce dashboard. Store Vacation Pro 1.7.0 introduces Checkout Protection, an optional safeguard that can respond when unusual checkout activity reaches limits you define.

Checkout Protection can monitor three types of activity:

• A large number of orders within a short period
• Repeated orders associated with the same IP address
• An unusual number of payment failures

Each signal can be configured independently with its own threshold and time window. If one of the enabled signals reaches its threshold, Store Vacation can automatically activate vacation mode and prevent further purchases.

This can provide an additional safeguard against suspicious activity such as automated card-testing attempts or sudden bot-driven checkout activity while you may not be actively monitoring the store. Checkout Protection works with both the Classic Checkout and WooCommerce Checkout Block.

When it activates, the temporary protection takes priority over normal purchasing exceptions. Customers cannot continue purchasing through product exclusions, Conditions, cart building, or Bypass Restrictions until the incident has been cleared. You can choose which Notice customers should see during the temporary closure and receive administrator emails when Checkout Protection is triggered and when the incident is cleared.

Incidents can be cleared manually, or you can configure an automatic cool-down period after which Store Vacation can release the Checkout Protection closure. Checkout Protection events can also appear in Vacation Reports, giving you a record of when protection was triggered and cleared. For same-IP detection, Store Vacation does not store raw customer IP addresses.

Getting started: Open the dedicated Checkout Protection section in Store Vacation settings, enable the signals you want to use, and configure their thresholds. You can also decide whether incidents should clear automatically or wait for manual review.

Keep Selling While Showing a Vacation Notice

Not every vacation notice needs to prevent customers from buying. Maybe you’re away from the office but can still process orders. Perhaps shipping will simply take a few extra days and you want customers to know before placing an order.

Version 1.7.0 improves Bypass Restrictions so you can keep normal purchasing available while using the default Keep shop pages open Behavior mode. Your vacation period can remain active and your customer notice can still be displayed, but products and checkout continue working normally.

For example, your notice might say:

We’re away until August 24. Orders are still welcome, but dispatch may take a little longer than usual.

Customers can then decide whether the delay works for them and continue purchasing as normal. When checkout is already available, Store Vacation automatically keeps cart-building and Save Cart controls out of the way because customers can simply complete their order.

Getting started: Use Keep shop pages open under Behavior and enable Bypass Restrictions if you want your vacation notice to remain visible without blocking purchases.

Know Whether Your Store Is Actually Open or Closed

With more flexible vacation behavior, having an active vacation period no longer necessarily means that your store is closed. Store Vacation Pro 1.7.0 makes that distinction clearer.

The Dashboard now provides a better indication of your store’s actual purchasing state. It can distinguish between a store that is closed, a store automatically closed by Checkout Protection, and a store that has an active vacation period but remains open for orders.

There is also a new optional Status Badge in the WordPress admin bar.

The badge appears in both the WordPress dashboard and on the storefront, giving administrators a quick way to check the current store status without opening Store Vacation settings.

This is especially useful when using Bypass Restrictions or several different closure types, where simply knowing that a Schedule is active doesn’t tell the whole story.

See the Customer Experience Before Leaving

The Behavior settings also receive a new sidebar summary in version 1.7.0. Instead of looking at several individual options and trying to work out how they combine, the sidebar gives you a clearer summary of what customers will experience with your current configuration.

That can be especially helpful as features such as cart building, Save Cart, Bypass Restrictions, and different storefront Behavior modes are used together. You can quickly check whether customers will be able to browse, add products to their cart, save their cart, or complete checkout.

More Possibilities for Developers and Automations

Store Vacation Pro 1.7.0 also adds integration with the WordPress Abilities API.

Store Vacation abilities are available for working with areas such as store status, Force Close, Schedules, recurring Weekday closures, Opening Hours, reusable Notices, and Vacation Shipping Options.

The Store Vacation REST API has also been expanded to include Vacation Shipping Options and several improvements to existing resources.

For most store owners, nothing needs to be configured here. These additions are intended to provide a stronger foundation for developers, integrations, and compatible automation tools that need to interact with Store Vacation programmatically.

Planning Your Next Store Break?

Store Vacation Pro 1.7.0 gives you more flexibility once your vacation begins, but a little preparation can make the experience even smoother for customers.

If you’re planning an upcoming closure, see our guide to notifying customers before a WooCommerce store closure for ideas on communicating dates and giving customers time to order before you leave. The article specifically covers advance notices, scheduling, countdowns, and Store Vacation notices.

For stores that need regular business-hour availability rather than an occasional vacation, our Store Opening Hours for WooCommerce guide explains displaying operating hours and automatically restricting orders outside those hours.

Ready to Upgrade?

Store Vacation Pro 1.7.0 gives you more choices than simply deciding whether your WooCommerce store should be open or closed.

You can let customers build and save carts while checkout is unavailable, continue accepting orders with vacation-specific shipping, temporarily hide delivery methods you cannot offer, see what customers are doing while you’re away, or keep the store fully open while clearly communicating delays.

And when you’re spending less time monitoring WooCommerce, Checkout Protection can provide an additional safeguard against unusual checkout activity. If you’re already using Store Vacation Pro, update to version 1.7.0 to start using the new features.

If you’re new to Store Vacation Pro, you can learn more about the plugin and choose the vacation setup that works best for your WooCommerce store.

Taking time away from your store doesn’t have to mean putting everything on hold. With Store Vacation Pro 1.7.0, you have more control over what keeps running while you’re away. 🏖️