WooCommerce: Limit Daily Sales For Cheap Products (Anti-Spam)

We could call this the “WooCommerce Anti-Spam Without a Plugin” series, while I attempt to fight against bad humans and very bad bots who love attacking the Business Bloomer checkout page with spam orders and fake user registrations.

My first attempts were (1) My Account registration anti-spam honeypot, (2) Checkout anti-carding-attack honeypot, and (3) Reducing the number of admin emails, but I can tell that (2) didn’t work, and I got another carding attack on a $9 product last weekend. Bots are smart.

Today, I’d like to share another anti-spam snippet that I’m currently testing on Business Bloomer. Most carding attacks, in fact, end up with the purchase of a single product in the $1-$9 range – which means that limiting the daily sales for specific, inexpensive, products may do the trick.

My code counts the times each product has been purchased during the day – and if a carding attack occurs, the product won’t be purchasable any longer until the end of the day. Because we’re talking about cheap products, it’s no problem for me to disallow legit sales as well for 24 hours. Use at your own risk, of course.

We already covered how to “Limit Sales Of A Product Per Day“, but this time I’d like to apply that to an array of products – and specifically all those that are under $10. Enjoy!

PHP Snippet: Limit Daily Sales For Products $1-$9 @ WooCommerce Checkout

Note: feel free to change the product price range (in the first line of the function I exclude products outside the $1-$9 price value), and the daily sales threshold (in the second-last line of the function I set this to max 3 sales).

/**
 * @snippet       Limit Sales To Avoid Carding Attacks @ WooCommerce
 * @how-to        Get CustomizeWoo.com FREE
 * @author        Rodolfo Melogli
 * @compatible    WooCommerce 8
 * @donate $9     https://businessbloomer.com/bloomer-armada/
 */

add_filter( 'woocommerce_is_purchasable', 'bbloomer_not_purchasable_after_daily_limit', 9999, 2 );

function bbloomer_not_purchasable_after_daily_limit( $is_purchasable, $product ) {
	
   // CONSIDER ONLY PRODUCTS IN THE $1-$9 RANGE
	if ( $product->get_price() > 9 || $product->get_price() < 1 ) return $is_purchasable;
	
	// GET TODAYS ORDERS AND COUNT PRODUCT SALES
	$all_orders = wc_get_orders(
		array(
			'limit' => -1,
			'date_created' => date( 'Y-m-d' ),
			'return' => 'ids',
		)
	);
	$count = array();
	foreach ( $all_orders as $all_order ) {
		$order = wc_get_order( $all_order );
		$items = $order->get_items();
		foreach ( $items as $item ) {
			$product_id = $item->get_product_id();
			if ( $product_id ) {
				$count[$product_id] = isset( $count[$product_id] ) ? $count[$product_id] + absint( $item['qty'] ) : absint( $item['qty'] );
			}
		}
	}
	
	// LIMIT 3 DAILY SALES
	if ( $count[$product->get_id()] >= 3 ) return false;
	
	return $is_purchasable;
	
}