Description
“Order within 2 hours 14 minutes for dispatch today.”
One line, and it lifts conversion, because a deadline beats a vague promise. This plugin works that deadline out properly from your real dispatch schedule, your real WooCommerce shipping zones and the public holidays of the country you ship from.
Built for European stores. A shop in Rotterdam selling into Germany, France and Poland has three different delivery realities, a Whit Monday its carrier observes and a Bastille Day it does not. The plugin handles all of that without a single line of code.
Working out of the box
Activate it and the countdown is already running. The plugin seeds a normal European setup you can then edit:
- Monday to Friday dispatch with a 16:00 cutoff.
- Monday to Friday delivery.
- Five regions: Benelux next day, DACH one to two days, Western Europe two to three, the rest of the EU three to five, and Spanish island postcodes four to six.
- The public holidays of your WooCommerce base country, for the next two years.
- A Friday line that reads “Order within {timer} today, or it ships on Monday”.
- An example country override for Ireland and an example Christmas profile, switched off until you want it.
Every one of those is an ordinary setting. Change them, delete them, or replace them entirely. Nothing is hard coded and nothing is touched again on later updates.
Accurate by design
Most countdown plugins subtract from a fixed clock. This one walks the calendar.
Order on Friday at five in the afternoon, with a four o’clock cutoff and a one day handling time. The plugin rolls past the missed cutoff, past Saturday and Sunday, past a Monday bank holiday, adds the handling day on Tuesday, then counts transit from Wednesday while skipping the weekend again. The shopper sees a date that will actually happen.
Every calculation follows your WordPress timezone, not the server clock, and daylight saving is handled by PHP’s own date library.
Working day logic
Dispatch days and delivery days are kept separate, because a warehouse that ships Monday to Friday may use a carrier that delivers on Saturday. Handling days count only dispatch days, transit days count only delivery days, and closure dates are skipped by both. A handling day is never spent on a Sunday or a bank holiday.
European public holidays, built in
Pick a country and press Import. The list fills with that country’s national public holidays for the next one to three years. Thirty countries are covered: every large EU market plus the United Kingdom, Switzerland and Norway.
Easter and the eight days that move with it are calculated with the Gregorian algorithm rather than looked up in a table, so any year works and nothing goes stale. Good Friday, Easter Monday, Ascension, Whit Monday and Corpus Christi all land correctly. Nothing is fetched from the internet.
Regions and postcodes
A region groups countries, postcode prefixes, or both, and gives them their own transit times, handling days and cutoff. Postcode prefixes catch the awkward places inside a country: 07 for the Balearics, 35 and 38 for the Canaries, and any prefix your carrier surcharges. A postcode match always beats a country match, because it is the more specific rule.
Shipping zones and carriers
The plugin reads your WooCommerce shipping zones directly. Switch a zone on and give it its own transit range, handling days and cutoff. Inside a zone, each shipping method can carry its own rules, so an express carrier holds a later cutoff and a faster transit than the standard one. Once the customer picks a method at checkout, the estimate follows it.
Regional detection
Optional, and it uses WooCommerce’s own bundled geolocation database, so no third party is ever contacted. A visitor from Munich sees the DACH window before entering any address.
Because a cached page would otherwise show whichever country warmed the cache, the widget re-renders itself from a no-store endpoint once the page loads. Every visitor gets their own dates even behind Redis, WP Rocket or Cloudflare.
Dynamic urgency
Three layers of wording, each taking over when it applies. A line of your own for any weekday, so Friday can read “Order within {timer} or it waits until Monday”. An urgent line that replaces it once the countdown drops below your threshold. And separate wording for the cart and checkout if you want a different tone there.
Placeholders: {timer} {dispatch_date} {delivery_from} {delivery_to} {zone} {region}
Override profiles
Schedule a profile for a date range and it applies itself. Bring the cutoff forward for Black Friday, add transit days over Christmas, or pause the countdown while the warehouse is shut for two weeks.
Where it appears
- Single product page, at any of nine positions.
- Shop and category listings.
- Cart page and cart drawer.
- Checkout.
- A Shipping Countdown block, which is how it reaches the block based cart and checkout.
- Three Elementor widgets: Cutoff Countdown, Delivery Estimate and Shipping Urgency Banner.
- Shortcodes
[gernx_shipping_countdown]and[gernx_delivery_estimate]. - Template tags
gernxszcw_the_countdown()andgernxszcw_get_countdown().
Appearance
Five presets: card, slim bar, inline text, digit boxes and minimal. Colour controls for accent, urgent, text and background, plus radius, font size and padding. Pulse, flash or shine effects, all of which stop for visitors who ask for reduced motion. An optional close button that hides the widget for a set number of hours.
Per product and per category
Extra handling days for bulky, made to order or personalised items, set on the product or on a whole category. The slowest matching rule wins, and product days always add on top, so a heavy item keeps its extra time even during a sale. Any product can hide the countdown entirely.
Privacy
No external service is contacted. Public holidays are calculated locally. Regional detection uses WooCommerce’s bundled database. The impression counter stores a daily total per placement and country code and nothing that identifies a visitor.
More information
Visit gernx.com. For the latest news, follow us on LinkedIn at Gernx IT.
Get Support & Connect
- Email support: hello@gernx.com
- Support forum: WordPress.org Support
Documentation also lives inside the plugin at Shipping Countdown Support & Docs.
Screenshots
Blocks
This plugin provides 1 block.
- Gernxszcw Countdown
Installation
- Install and activate WooCommerce.
- Upload the plugin through Plugins Add New Upload Plugin, or install it from the plugin directory.
- Activate the plugin. The countdown starts working immediately with European starter settings.
- Go to Shipping Countdown Settings and change the dispatch days, cutoff times and transit days to match your warehouse.
- Check the Holidays tab. Your base country’s public holidays are already there.
FAQ
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Does it need WooCommerce?
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Yes. Shipping zones, carriers and the cart and checkout placements all come from WooCommerce. Settings stay saved if WooCommerce is ever deactivated, and the countdown starts again when it returns.
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What is set up for me when I activate it?
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A Monday to Friday week with a 16:00 cutoff, one to two transit days, five European regions, your base country’s public holidays for two years, a Friday urgency line, and one example country override. The countdown appears on the product page, the shop listing, the cart and the checkout straight away. All of it is editable and none of it is reapplied on later updates.
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Will an update overwrite my settings?
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No. The starter content is written once, on first activation, and only when no settings exist yet.
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How do I set up EU delivery windows?
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They are already there. Open the Regions tab and adjust the five that were created, or add your own. One region per speed band works best: neighbours next day, the near continent in two, the far edges in three to five, and islands by postcode.
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How do closure dates work?
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On a closure date nothing is dispatched, so the dispatch date rolls to the next day you ship, and a handling day is never spent on it. With Holidays block delivery switched on, the delivery window steps over the date too. Past dates are harmless and can be cleared with one button.
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Why is my delivery date weeks away?
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Handling days are counted in dispatch days, not calendar days. If only one weekday is ticked as a dispatch day, one handling day means a whole week. Tick every day you genuinely ship and every day your carrier genuinely delivers.
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Nothing shows on my cart or checkout
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WooCommerce ships two versions of those pages. The classic shortcode version fires PHP hooks, so the Placement settings work there. The block version renders in JavaScript and fires none of them. The Placement check panel says which one you use. On a block page, add the Shipping Countdown block instead.
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Does it work with page caching?
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Yes. Leave cache safe mode on and cache as aggressively as you like. The markup carries a deadline stamp and a no-store REST call corrects it once the page loads. Do not cache
/wp-json/gernxszcw/v1/scheduleitself. -
The time is wrong by an hour
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Check Settings General in WordPress. Every calculation follows the site timezone. Pick a named city rather than a fixed UTC offset, otherwise daylight saving will not apply.
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Can different carriers have different cutoffs?
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Yes. On the Zones & carriers tab, switch on a zone and tick the specific shipping method. Give it its own cutoff, handling days and transit range. It takes over once the customer selects that method.
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Does it contact any external service?
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No. Public holidays are calculated locally, including Easter and everything derived from it. Regional detection is optional and uses WooCommerce’s own bundled geolocation database.
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Will uninstalling delete my settings?
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Uninstalling removes the plugin’s settings, its impression table and its cached data. Product and category handling days are left in place, so nothing is lost if you reinstall.
Reviews
There are no reviews for this plugin.
Contributors & Developers
“Gernx Smart Shipping Zone & Cutoff Countdown for WooCommerce” is open source software. The following people have contributed to this plugin.
Contributors
Translate “Gernx Smart Shipping Zone & Cutoff Countdown for WooCommerce” into your language.
Interested in development?
Browse the code, check out the SVN repository, or subscribe to the development log by RSS.
Changelog
1.0.0
- First public release.
- Live dispatch cutoff countdown with per day cutoff times.
- Delivery window calculation counting dispatch days and delivery days separately.
- Weekend, holiday and warehouse closure handling with a date picker and a readable list.
- Public holiday import for 30 European countries, with Easter calculated rather than tabulated.
- Regions matching by country and postcode prefix, with their own transit, handling and cutoff.
- Per zone and per carrier transit times, handling days and cutoff overrides.
- Product and category handling exceptions, plus a per product hide option.
- Scheduled override profiles for peak seasons, with an optional pause.
- Country level transit padding and messages, with every matching notice shown.
- Product, shop listing, cart, cart drawer and checkout placements, each with its own position dropdown.
- A Shipping Countdown block for the block editor, including the block based cart and checkout.
- Three Elementor widgets with native style controls.
- Two shortcodes and two template tags.
- Five style presets, colour controls, optional pulse, flash or shine effects and an optional close button, all respecting reduced motion.
- Cache safe mode using a no-store REST endpoint, with resync on tab focus and WooCommerce cart updates.
- Impression reporting with a fourteen day chart.
- Support, documentation and donate screens with a copyable system report.
- European starter content seeded on first activation.
- HPOS and block cart and checkout compatibility declared.