WooCommerce: Delete Customer After a Failed (Spam) Order

Once again, I’m trying to find WooCommerce anti-spam workarounds to avoid manual admin work like receiving hundreds of emails, deleting hundreds of fake orders and fake WordPress users.

In today’s “episode” I will try to clean the WordPress User database table after a failed order, because I’m really angry when “17PmU3MmKZS9ZAy7 17PmU3MmKZS9ZAy7” manages to register an account on Business Bloomer after a carding attack!

Please test this snippet on a dev/staging environment and not directly on the live site. Deleting a WordPress user is never a good idea, so you need to make sure everything is working as it should. Enjoy!

PHP Snippet: Delete Customer After a Failed Order @ WooCommerce Checkout

Note 1: this snippet runs on the WooCommerce Thank You page, so make sure your credit card orders are redirected there.

Note 2: this function only works for non-guest orders, because it then uses the logged in user to check if they have previous legit orders.

Note 3: to me, a legit order is when a customer has previous Processing, Completed, Pending or On-hold orders in their name. Feel free to remove or add order statuses to the array.

Note 4: as of now, if this is a first-time customer (so, no previous orders), they will be deleted. It may be a problem for legit customers who end up with a failed order due to a failed payment… Still not sure how to exclude these humans.

Note 5: how can you test this? Because you really don’t want to place a fake order with a real credit card and make it fail… My workaround: from the WP admin I create a new user – then I create a manual WooCommerce order in their name – then set the order status to failed. At this point, I go to the thank you page and the code triggers. User should be deleted, UNLESS the same user has a previous legit order.

/**
 * @snippet       Destroy Failed Order Customer @ WooCommerce Checkout
 * @how-to        Get CustomizeWoo.com FREE
 * @author        Rodolfo Melogli
 * @compatible    WooCommerce 8
 * @donate $9     https://businessbloomer.com/bloomer-armada/
 */

add_action( 'woocommerce_thankyou', 'bbloomer_destroy_failed_order_customer' );

function bbloomer_destroy_failed_order_customer( $order_id ) {
	$order = wc_get_order( $order_id );
	if ( $order->has_status( 'failed' ) ) {				
		$customer_id = is_callable( array( $order, 'get_customer_id' ) ) ? $order->get_customer_id() : 0;
		if ( $customer_id == 0 ) return;
		$legit_orders = wc_get_orders( [ 
			'customer' => $customer_id,
			'status' => array( 'wc-processing', 'wc-completed', 'wc-pending' ),
         'return' => 'ids',
		] );
		if ( count( $legit_orders ) > 0 ) return; 
		require_once( ABSPATH.'wp-admin/includes/user.php' );
		wp_delete_user( $customer_id );
	}
}