How to Add a Custom Order Status to WooCommerce (4 Plugins Compared)

WooCommerce ships with seven order statuses: pending, processing, on-hold, completed, cancelled, refunded, and failed. For a lot of stores, that list doesn’t match how orders actually move. A made-to-order shop needs “In Production.” A pickup counter needs “Ready for Pickup.” A B2B store invoicing on terms needs “Awaiting Payment Confirmation.” This post compares four real plugins that add custom order statuses to WooCommerce without touching code, plus the hook-based alternative if you’d rather skip the plugin entirely. Short version: Ni WooCommerce Custom Order Status is the strongest free pick on WooCommerce’s newer HPOS order storage, and Custom Order Status for WooCommerce from Tyche Softwares is the safer bet if you need different default statuses per payment method.

Compare the Plugins at a Glance

Custom Order Status Manager for WooCommerce

Built by Bright Plugins, Custom Order Status Manager for WooCommerce treats each status as its own entry you create from a dedicated admin screen, rather than a row in a settings form.

• Price: Free, Pro from $39/year
• Requires: WordPress 4.9+, PHP 7.4+
• Last updated: September 7, 2026

What it does: go to WooCommerce > Order Status, click Add New, and you’re creating a status the same way you’d create a post, with a title, a slug, an icon, and a text or background color. Every status shows up immediately in the order status dropdown, in bulk actions, and in its own column on the orders list, which is genuinely useful when you’re scanning a crowded order table for the three orders stuck in “Awaiting Supplier.” The real differentiator here is per-payment-method defaults: a new order can land in a different starting status depending on whether it was paid by card or bank transfer, set once under WooCommerce settings, with no rule engine needed.

Setup is straightforward and specific to this plugin. After activating it, go to WooCommerce > Order Status, click Add New, give the status a title and a unique slug, and hit Publish. To turn on an email for that status, go to WooCommerce > Settings > Email, find the template matching your new status, enable it, and save.

The honest limitation: the free version doesn’t move orders between statuses on its own. Automatic status transitions by time interval, pulling custom statuses into WooCommerce’s sales reports, and adjusting stock on a status change are all locked behind the $39/year Pro upgrade. If your workflow depends on an order aging out of “Awaiting Payment” automatically, budget for Pro from the start.

Custom Order Status for WooCommerce

Custom Order Status for WooCommerce is Tyche Softwares’ free “Lite” plugin, and it covers much the same ground as the one above with one real difference worth calling out.

• Price: Free, Pro from $49/year
• Requires: WordPress 4.4+, PHP 7.4+
• Last updated: September 1, 2026

What it does: you can set the default status assigned to new orders per WooCommerce payment gateway, not just one generic default for the whole store. That matters if, say, cash-on-delivery orders should start in a different lane than card payments, without anyone writing a woocommerce_order_status_pending hook by hand. Statuses carry a label, slug, icon, and color, and they’re recognized in WooCommerce’s bulk order actions and in WooCommerce Analytics reports, so adding a status doesn’t mean losing visibility into it on the reporting side.

Setup follows the plugin’s own documentation: install through Plugins > Add New or upload the folder to /wp-content/plugins/, activate it, then open WooCommerce > Settings > Custom Order Status to start building statuses.

The honest limitation: it carries a 66 out of 100 rating from 32 reviews, noticeably lower than the other three plugins here. The free tier stops at manual status changes, bulk actions, and payment-gateway defaults; rule-based automatic transitions are a Pro feature. A handful of manually applied statuses is fine on the free tier; having the plugin make decisions for you means paying either way.

Ni WooCommerce Custom Order Status

Ni WooCommerce Custom Order Status is the most recently updated of the four, and the only one that states High-Performance Order Storage (HPOS) compatibility outright in its own listing.

• Price: Free, Pro from $34
• Requires: WordPress 5.0+, PHP 7.4+
• Last updated: October 18, 2026

What it does: every custom status gets a color that tints the entire order row in the orders list, not just a small badge next to the status name. For anyone scanning fifty rows a day looking for the handful marked “Awaiting Supplier,” that’s a real usability difference over a plain dropdown. A status still attached to any order can’t be deleted by accident either; you have to move those orders somewhere else first, which closes off one obvious way to break a live store. It also works whether a store is running HPOS or the older post-based order storage, which isn’t something every plugin in this space confirms.

Setup matches the plugin’s own instructions: install via Plugins > Add New and search for the plugin, or upload the folder manually, then activate it with WooCommerce already running. Go to the Order Status menu, choose Add New, set a title, slug, and color, and turn on the status email if customers should be notified when an order reaches it.

The honest limitation: the free tier’s email is one global template per status, not the rich-text, placeholder-driven email the Pro version adds, and its reporting is a basic order list rather than the CSV-exportable one Pro offers. That’s fine if statuses plus a simple alert cover your needs, and worth the upgrade (from $34, sold directly by the developer) if customers expect a properly worded email at each fulfillment stage.

Additional Custom Order Status for WooCommerce

Additional Custom Order Status for WooCommerce, from WPFactory, answers a question the other three mostly skip: once a status exists, does WooCommerce actually treat it correctly everywhere else in the store?

• Price: Free, Pro from $49.99/year (or $149 lifetime)
• Requires: WordPress 4.7+ (PHP requirement not listed by the developer)
• Last updated: August 20, 2026

What it does: for every custom status, you can flag, independently, whether an order in that status is editable, counts as paid, is valid for payment, and keeps download permissions active for digital products. That’s exactly the part that trips people up when they add a status through code without thinking it through: WooCommerce keeps separate internal lists for “is this order paid” and “can a customer still edit this,” and a status missing from those lists behaves oddly even though it looks fine sitting in the dropdown. It also lets you reorder all statuses, including WooCommerce’s own defaults, and it states HPOS compatibility in its listing.

Setup, per the plugin’s own installation notes: upload the plugin folder to /wp-content/plugins/ or install it through the Plugins screen, activate it, then start at WooCommerce > Order Status.

The honest limitation: this is the smallest of the four by a wide margin, with far fewer active installs and only a handful of reviews on record, even though they’re all five stars. It’s also newer to this comparison than the other three in terms of track record. The free version doesn’t send status-change emails at all; that’s Pro-only here, unlike the other three plugins, which all offer at least a basic email for free.

If You’d Rather Not Add Another Plugin

Under the hood, a WooCommerce order status is a WordPress post status with a wc- prefix. You can register your own by hooking register_post_status() on init and adding your slug and label to the array WooCommerce builds through the wc_order_statuses filter. For a single status with no settings screen, no icons, and no email UI, that’s genuinely a short snippet in a custom plugin or your child theme’s functions file.

Where it gets messy is everything downstream of the status itself. WooCommerce keeps separate filters for which statuses count as paid (woocommerce_order_is_paid_statuses) and which count as still pending, and it uses those lists for stock reduction, refund eligibility, and reporting. Register a status without also filtering those lists, and it will look correct in the order list while behaving wrong everywhere else: orders can get flagged as paid when they’re not, or never trigger a stock decrease at all. That’s the exact gap the fourth plugin above is built to close without writing any of this yourself.

How to Pick

1. If you’re already running WooCommerce’s HPOS and want color-coded rows you can scan quickly, use Ni WooCommerce Custom Order Status.
2. If you need different default statuses depending on the payment method, use Custom Order Status for WooCommerce from Tyche Softwares.
3. If you want icon-based statuses and are willing to pay for automatic time-based transitions, start with Custom Order Status Manager for WooCommerce and budget for its Pro tier.
4. If a status needs to behave like “paid” or “editable” in ways WooCommerce doesn’t do by default, use Additional Custom Order Status for WooCommerce.
5. If you only need one or two statuses and don’t want another settings screen in your dashboard, register the status with code and filter the paid/pending lists yourself.

None of the four plugins above is a perfect fit for every workflow, and none of them is ConicPlex’s own work. When the fulfillment logic goes beyond adding a status label, conditional rules by product category, syncing statuses to an external system, triggering SMS instead of email, our plugin development team builds that directly against your store rather than stretching a general-purpose status plugin to fit. The same applies if a custom status is one piece of a bigger WooCommerce development project.

Frequently Asked Questions

Will a custom order status break WooCommerce’s default emails or reports?

No, WooCommerce’s default statuses and their emails stay untouched. What a new custom status won’t get automatically is WooCommerce’s built-in transactional email, which is why all four plugins above ship their own simple email option. If you want the status tracked in WooCommerce Analytics the same way “Completed” is, check that the plugin you pick actually feeds it into reports; not all of them do by default.

Do custom order statuses work with High-Performance Order Storage (HPOS)?

Most current plugins do, since WooCommerce handles order status through the same registration system whether HPOS is on or off. Ni WooCommerce Custom Order Status and Additional Custom Order Status for WooCommerce both state HPOS compatibility directly in their listings. If you’re already running HPOS, confirm compatibility before installing rather than assuming it, especially with an older or less-documented plugin.

Can a plugin assign a custom status automatically based on product type or category?

Not in the free tier of any of the four plugins compared here; that capability wasn’t part of what their own descriptions document. If conditional status assignment by category is the one feature you actually need, you’re looking at either a developer hook on an order-processing action like woocommerce_checkout_order_processed, or a commercial extension built specifically around conditional status rules.

Do custom order statuses survive a WooCommerce or theme update?

Yes. Custom statuses are registered by the plugin’s own code every time WordPress loads, not stored inside a theme, so a theme switch or a WooCommerce core update doesn’t remove them. The real risk is deactivating or deleting the plugin itself: WooCommerce stops recognizing the status string, and any order still sitting in it will need relabeling.

Will customers see a custom status in their own order history?

Yes, assuming the status has a customer-facing label. WooCommerce pulls whatever label is attached to the status slug into My Account > Orders the same way it shows “Processing” or “Completed.” Avoid reusing a default WooCommerce label for a different meaning; that’s what actually confuses customers, not the presence of a new status.

Sources

• Custom Order Status Manager for WooCommerce (WordPress.org)
• Custom Order Status Manager for WooCommerce Pro pricing (Bright Plugins)
• Custom Order Status for WooCommerce (WordPress.org)
• Custom Order Status for WooCommerce Pro pricing (Tyche Softwares)
• Ni WooCommerce Custom Order Status (WordPress.org)
• Ni WooCommerce Custom Order Status Pro pricing (Nazi Infotech)
• Additional Custom Order Status for WooCommerce (WordPress.org)
• Additional Custom Order Status for WooCommerce Pro pricing (WPFactory)