StockLatch – On-Hold Order & Stock Manager for WooCommerce

Description

WooCommerce reduces stock as soon as an order reaches On hold. That is usually what you want, but WooCommerce’s built-in Hold stock (minutes) setting only expires orders sitting in Pending payment. It does not expire ordinary On hold orders.

If you accept Direct Bank Transfer (BACS), cheque, or another offline payment method, that difference matters. A customer places an order, the order goes On hold, the stock comes off the shelf, and if that customer never pays, the stock stays reserved until somebody notices and changes the order by hand.

StockLatch closes that gap. You pick which payment gateways to watch and one reservation timeout. When an order on a watched gateway enters On hold, StockLatch schedules a single check for the moment its deadline falls due. If the order is still unpaid and still On hold when that moment arrives, StockLatch cancels it.

Why cancelling is the safe answer

StockLatch never edits product stock itself. It changes the order status to Cancelled, and WooCommerce’s own stock restoration then runs, exactly as it does when you cancel an order by hand. WooCommerce checks what it actually reduced for that order and restores only that, which means no double restoration and no fighting with other extensions.

StockLatch also deliberately does not offer a “release the stock but leave the order On hold” option. That sounds appealing, but it lets you sell the same units twice: the released stock goes to a new customer, then the original customer pays for an order you can no longer fulfil.

What it does

• Watch one or more payment gateways, chosen by you.
• One reservation timeout, in minutes, hours, or days. The default is 48 hours.
• One scheduled check per order, run through WooCommerce’s bundled Action Scheduler.
• Every safety condition re-checked at the deadline, never assumed from when the job was queued.
• An internal order note whenever StockLatch starts monitoring an order or cancels one.
• A dashboard showing monitored orders, units held, what expires in the next 24 hours, and what it handled recently.
• A filterable activity log explaining why each order was cancelled, skipped, or superseded.
• A confirmation-gated tool for monitoring orders that were already On hold before you installed it.
• Full High-Performance Order Storage (HPOS) support.

Built to be careful

• Disabled on install. StockLatch does nothing until you enable it, pick a gateway, and save.
• No surprise cancellations. Orders already On hold are never picked up automatically. You import them deliberately, and each one gets a full fresh timeout starting at import.
• Re-checked at the last moment. Before cancelling, StockLatch confirms the plugin is still enabled, the order still exists, it is still On hold, it is still unpaid, its gateway is still selected, and its deadline really has passed.
• Safe to run twice. Each lifecycle is claimed atomically, so a duplicated or replayed job cannot cancel twice or restore stock twice.
• Your changes win. Mark an order paid, or move it to any other status, and StockLatch closes its lifecycle and stands down.
• Turning a gateway off is a brake. Deselect a gateway and orders already queued on it are skipped rather than cancelled.

Privacy

StockLatch makes no external requests. There is no telemetry, no usage tracking, no license check, and no connection to any third-party service. Its activity table stores only order IDs, gateway IDs, quantities, timestamps, states, and reason codes. No customer names, email addresses, postal addresses, or payment details are ever recorded in it.