WooCommerce: Display Out of Stock Products (Shortcode)

A client of mine wanted to show out of stock products on a separate page – so I coded a simple shortcode for you all!

You can use this shortcode for different goals. For example, you might want to display what products you’ve sold to enhance customer trust / social proof.

So let’s see (1) how to create a shortcode and (2) how to take advantage of the existing [products] WooCommerce shortcode and its “ids” parameter to pass just those product IDs that are out of stock!

PHP Snippet: Display Out of Stock Products via a Shortcode – WooCommerce

After you add the PHP below to your website, you can use the shortcode [out_of_stock_products] on any page.

In order for this to work, “Hide out of stock items from the catalog” must be disabled in the WooCommerce settings, otherwise the shortcode will return nothing.

/**
 * @snippet       Display Out of Stock Products via Shortcode - WooCommerce
 * @how-to        Get tutoraspire.com FREE
 * @author        Tutor Aspire
 * @compatible    WooCommerce 5
 * @donate $9     https://tutoraspire.com
 */
  
add_shortcode( 'out_of_stock_products', 'tutoraspire_out_of_stock_products_shortcode' );
  
function tutoraspire_out_of_stock_products_shortcode() {

$args = array(
'post_type' => 'product',
'posts_per_page' => -1,
'post_status' => 'publish',
'meta_query' => array(
array(
'key' => '_stock_status',
'value' => 'outofstock',
)
),
'fields' => 'ids',
);

$product_ids = get_posts( $args ); 
$product_ids = implode( ",", $product_ids );

return do_shortcode("[products ids='$product_ids']");

}