Here we detail the taxonomies and post types specific to WooCommerce, which are fundamental for organizing and managing different content types within a WordPress site. Understanding these elements is crucial for developers and site administrators to effectively extend, customize, and manage their WooCommerce installations.

Taxonomies and Post Types #

Two major building blocks in the WordPress environment are taxonomies and post types.

• Taxonomy. A grouping of post types, such as categories and tags.
• Post types. With post types, WordPress creates a distinction in different content types. For example, by default WordPress has different post types for “posts”, “pages”, “media”, etc.

WooCommerce Taxonomies and Post Types #

WooCommerce creates a few different posts types and a couple of taxonomies to group those post types.

WooCommerce installs the following post types and taxonomies — the first levels are post types, and the second levels are taxonomies for their top-level post type.

• Product: product
  • Product categories: product_cat
  • Product tags: product_tag
  • Product variation: product_variation (these are hidden from the UI)
  • Product visibility: product_visibility
• Shop order(Legacy) : shop_order
  • Order statuses: shop_order_status
  • Order refunds: shop_order_refund
• Shop coupon: shop_coupon
• Shop webhook: shop_webhook

WordPress Core Tables #

WooCommerce makes use of existing WordPress tables to store some information:

• wp_options is used for store settings and information about the store such as store address, countries a store sells or ships to and other information that you would configure from WooCommerce > Settings > General.
• wp_posts and wp_postmeta contain information around products, coupons, and shipping classes.
• wp_terms, wp_termmeta, wp_term_taxonomy, wp_term_relationships are used for storing taxonomies such as product tags, categories and attributes, as well as shipping classes and tax classes.
• wp_commentmeta stores product reviews.
• wp_users stores some customer information such as username, email address, and their assigned user ID number.
• wp_usermeta stores additional customer information such as their name, shipping address and billing address.

WooCommerce Custom Tables #

In addition to the above, WooCommerce also creates some custom tables that store some additional information.

• wp_woocommerce_payment_tokens stores the payment tokens used by payment gateways. The way this looks will vary depending on the payment gateway(s) you are using on your site.
• wp_woocommerce_payment_tokenmeta shows you additional customer payment information such as the last 4 digits of a card, card type, and expiry date.
• wp_woocommerce_sessions allows you to see active cart sessions from your site’s visitors.
• wp_woocommerce_shipping_zones, wp_woocommerce_shipping_zone_methods, and wp_woocommerce_shipping_zone_locations list your configured shipping zones, locations for these zones and the shipping methods available for these zones.
• wp_woocommerce_tax_rates and wp_woocommerce_tax_rate_locations provide an overview of the tax rates that are configured and the locations they are configured for.
• wp_woocommerce_api_keys is where you can see your stored REST API keys.
• wp_woocommerce_attribute_taxonomies provides an overview of all of the attributes that are stored on your WooCommerce site.
• wp_woocommerce_downloadable_product_permissions stores a record of which customers have download permissions for which downloadable products.
• wp_woocommerce_log stores logs and event data from WooCommerce.

Order taxonomy differences when using High Performance Order Storage (HPOS) #

Starting from WooCommerce 8.2, released in October 2023, High-Performance Order Storage (HPOS) is officially flagged as stable and is enabled by default for new installations.

Shops launched using HPOS do not use the shop_order post type. As orders are not stored in the _posts table.

If your store initially installed a WooCommerce version lower than 8.2. You can read about backwards compatibility, and migrating to the more performant HPOS, in our HPOS documentation.

HPOS introduces dedicated tables for data such as orders, order addresses, and dedicated indexes. This results in fewer read/write operations and fewer busy tables. This feature enables ecommerce stores of all shapes and sizes to scale to their maximum potential. 

instead of being stored in the _posts and _postmeta tables, HPOS stores order data in four dedicated order tables:

• _wc_orders
• _wc_order_addresses
• _wc_order_operational_data
• _wc_orders_meta

Developers: For detailed information about the schema used in HPOS. Refer to the Developer blog post detailing the HPOS database schema

Questions and support #

Do you still have questions and need assistance? 

This documentation is about the free, core WooCommerce plugin, for which support is provided in our community forums on WordPress.org. By searching this forum, you’ll often find that your question has been asked and answered before.

If you haven’t created a WordPress.org account to use the forums, here’s how.

• If you’re looking to extend the core functionality shown here, we recommend reviewing available extensions in the WooCommerce Marketplace.
• Need ongoing advanced support or a customization built for WooCommerce? Hire a Woo Agency Partner.
• Are you a developer building your own WooCommerce integration or extension? Check our Developer Resources.