The obvious way to create a manual order in WooCommerce is to navigate to the orders page in the admin panel. Just click ‘Add New’ at the top and enter the details. But sometimes there’s specific functionality that only shows up on the front-end and is not included on the orders page.
To address that, you’ll need to login as the customer on the front-end and place the order. There’s a nifty premium plugin called ’Shop as Customer for WooCommerce’ that makes this process really easy. Once installed, administrators can simply visit the front-end and select a customer from the admin toolbar:
Then you can shop your site as the customer, placing the order on their behalf. You can also invoice the customer in one-click from the order confirmation page.
Our friends at Barn2 Media have put together a really great guide on How to Take Manual WooCommerce Orders (Including WooCommerce Phone Orders) which is worth a read.
Another option is to use the free User Switching plugin that we’ve mentioned before. It allows you to easily switch to another user (customer) and navigate the site as them. In my opinion, it’s not quite as seamless as the Shop as Customer plugin for this specific purpose but it will work.
