A WooCommerce checkout that fits digital goods: no delivery address, paid orders that complete themselves, and the EU consent that lets you deliver immediately.
This guide is for people who already have AumDigital installed. All of its settings are in WooCommerce → Settings → Digital goods — the tab is named after what it does, not after the plugin.
The AumDigital admin is in English on every site. No translation has been published for it yet, so the labels quoted here are what you will see whatever language your WordPress is set to.
1. What it changes, and when
WooCommerce was built for parcels. Selling a licence key, a PDF, a course seat or a booking through it means working around three assumptions it makes about physical goods.
AumDigital changes those three things — and only while every item in the cart is a virtual product. The moment one physical item is added, the checkout is WooCommerce's own again, with every field back in place. You do not have to choose between a digital store and a mixed one.
It works with both the block checkout and the shortcode checkout.
AumDigital requires WooCommerce. It does nothing on its own.
2. Skip the address
WooCommerce → Settings → Digital goods → Checkout for an all-digital cart.
| Setting | Default |
|---|---|
| Skip the address | On |
Removes street, address line 2, city, postcode and state from checkout. Nothing is going anywhere, so nothing needs an address, and five fields that a buyer would otherwise fill in for no reason disappear.
Three fields deliberately stay:
- Country. Tax is calculated from it, and several payment gateways refuse a payment without one. Removing it would break both.
- Name and email. An order without them is useless to you.
Company and phone are governed by WooCommerce's own settings and are not touched.
2.1 How it is done, and why that matters
AumDigital does not hide the fields with CSS, and it does not replace the checkout. It uses the mechanism WooCommerce already has for this: the per-country address locale, where a field marked required => false, hidden => true is neither rendered nor validated. Core uses it to drop the postcode for the UAE and the state for Afghanistan.
AumDigital applies the same marking to the same fields, with the condition changed from which country to is anything in the cart physical.
The practical consequence: both checkouts obey it, validation agrees with what is on screen, and a theme or payment plugin that reads the field list sees a consistent answer. A CSS-based approach fails all three.
3. Complete paid virtual orders
WooCommerce → Settings → Digital goods → Orders.
| Setting | Default |
|---|---|
| Complete paid virtual orders | On |
WooCommerce completes a paid order by itself only when every item is both virtual and downloadable. That is a narrower rule than most digital shops need.
A virtual item that is not a download — a licence key you issue, a booking, a course seat, a consultation — leaves the order sitting in Processing until somebody opens it and marks it Completed by hand. On a shop that sells those, it means every order needs a human before the customer gets the "your order is complete" email.
With this on, every virtual item is treated as needing no processing, so a paid all-virtual order goes straight to Completed.
Only orders that actually get paid are affected. Bank transfer, cheque and cash-on-delivery orders still wait for payment exactly as before — this setting does not mark an unpaid order complete.
Leave it off if a human really does have to do something — issue a key by hand, approve a booking, check eligibility. In that case Processing is doing its job: it is the list of orders somebody still owes work on.
4. EU right of withdrawal
WooCommerce → Settings → Digital goods → EU right of withdrawal.
| Setting | Default |
|---|---|
| Ask for consent | Off |
| Consent wording | Empty — a built-in wording is used |
In the EU a consumer keeps a 14-day right to withdraw from a purchase of digital content, unless they expressly agreed, before delivery, to immediate delivery and to losing that right.
A shop that delivers instantly and never asks for that agreement is in the position of having delivered goods a buyer can still return for fourteen days.
Turning Ask for consent on adds a required checkbox at checkout under Additional order information, shown only when the cart is all digital. The order cannot be placed without it.
4.1 What gets recorded
Consent is written onto the order itself, with the time it was given, and it appears:
- on the order screen in the admin, as Withdrawal right waived: Yes, at …
- in the order email, as a row labelled Withdrawal right waived
That record is the point of the feature. The checkbox is what the buyer agrees to; the timestamp on the order is what you still have months later.
4.2 The wording
Leave Consent wording empty and AumDigital uses its own:
I expressly request that the digital content be delivered immediately, and I acknowledge that I thereby lose my right of withdrawal once delivery has begun.
Write your own if your lawyer gives you one, or if you need it in your customers' language. The wording is shown exactly as you type it.
This plugin gives you the mechanism, not legal advice. Whether you need the consent, and what it must say, depends on where you and your buyers are.
5. Settings reference
| Section | Setting | Default | Applies when |
|---|---|---|---|
| Checkout | Skip the address | On | Cart is all virtual |
| Orders | Complete paid virtual orders | On | Order is all virtual and paid |
| EU right of withdrawal | Ask for consent | Off | Cart is all digital |
| EU right of withdrawal | Consent wording | Built-in text | — |
6. Troubleshooting
The address fields are still there. Something in the cart is not marked virtual. Open the product and tick Virtual on the Product data panel — every item has to be virtual, not just most of them.
Orders still sit in Processing. Either Complete paid virtual orders is off, or an item in the order is not virtual. A single physical item puts the whole order back under WooCommerce's own rule.
Tax stopped being calculated. Check that the country field is still being collected. AumDigital keeps it deliberately — if it is gone, something else removed it.
A payment gateway rejects the order. Several gateways require a country. Same answer as above: country must stay.
The consent checkbox does not appear. It only shows when the cart is all digital, and only when Ask for consent is on.
I cannot find the settings. They are under WooCommerce → Settings → Digital goods — the tab is named after what it does, not after the plugin, and there is no top-level menu for it.
Nothing works at all. AumDigital requires WooCommerce. If WooCommerce is inactive, the plugin stays out of the way entirely.