Hide Local Pickup for Specific Products

Local pickup is the cheapest shipping method you will ever run, and it is exactly wrong for part of your catalogue. Made-to-order items that ship straight from a supplier cannot be collected from your counter. Bulky stock you keep off-site is not in the building. Perishables you would rather not have sitting on a shelf until someone remembers to collect them. So the practical requirement is narrow: hide local pickup for specific products while leaving it on everything else.

Two rules, opposite directions

Most stores end up needing both:

• No pickup for these products. Dropshipped, supplier-shipped or off-site stock. Pickup must disappear when such an item is in the cart.
• Pickup only for these products. Fragile, oversized, licensed or age-checked goods you refuse to hand to a courier. Every other method must disappear.

They are the same mechanism with the condition inverted, and both belong on WooCommerce's rate filter rather than in CSS or JavaScript. A method hidden in the browser is still selectable server-side, which produces orders you cannot fulfil.

The rule in code

```php add_filter( 'woocommerce_package_rates', function ( $rates, $package ) { $no_pickup_ids = [ 128, 341 ]; // products that cannot be collected

foreach ( $package['contents'] as $item ) { if ( in_array( $item['product_id'], $no_pickup_ids, true ) ) { foreach ( array_keys( $rates ) as $rate_id ) { if ( str_starts_with( $rate_id, 'local_pickup' ) ) { unset( $rates[ $rate_id ] ); } } break; } }

return $rates; }, 10, 2 ); ```

For the pickup-only case, keep the rates whose ID starts with `local_pickup` and unset everything else. In both variants, match on the rate ID prefix: WooCommerce appends the method instance, so the ID is `local_pickup:4`, not `local_pickup`.

If nothing changes when you reload, you have hit the session rate cache rather than a broken rule. Empty the cart and try again.

Managing it as data instead of code

Hardcoded product IDs age badly — the list lives in PHP, nobody remembers it, and a new supplier-shipped product silently becomes collectable. Our WooCommerce Shipping Gateway Per Product plugin keeps the same filter logic but takes the product and category selection from wp-admin, so the rule is visible next to the product it applies to and a shop manager can maintain it.

If the rule is really about a whole group of stock rather than individual items, treat it as a category rule instead — see setting the shipping method by product category.

Mixed carts and the empty-checkout trap

A cart holding one collectable item and one that must be shipped needs a decision:

• Strictest wins — remove pickup for the whole cart. Simple, safe, and the customer gets one delivery.
• Block the combination — a cart notice asking the customer to split the order. Necessary when a pickup-only item cannot legally be couriered.

The failure to avoid is a combination that removes every rate. A pickup-only product plus a no-pickup product does exactly that if you apply both rules blindly, and the customer sees a checkout with no shipping options and no explanation. Detect the collision and show a clear cart notice instead.

Geography belongs in zones, not product rules

"Pickup only for customers near the store" is not a product rule. Put local pickup in a shipping zone limited to your postcodes, region or country, and let the zone handle who sees it. Combine the two layers and the meaning stays clean: the zone decides *who* may collect, the product rule decides *what* may be collected.

The same split applies to local delivery: a zone of nearby postcodes with a delivery method, plus product rules for stock that cannot go on your own van.

Test checklist

1. No-pickup product alone — pickup is gone.
2. Normal product alone — pickup is back.
3. Both together — matches the mixed-cart rule you chose.
4. Pickup-only product alone — only pickup remains.
5. Pickup-only plus no-pickup — a clear notice, never an empty rate list.
6. An out-of-zone address — pickup absent because of the zone, not the rule.

Check the cart page and the checkout, in both the classic and block-based versions, and place one live order through pickup so the confirmation email and order status read the way you expect.