How to Disable Payment Methods in WooCommerce (Ultimate Guide)

Many WooCommerce store owners make the mistake of enabling every payment method available. But we’ve learned that having too many payment options can actually confuse your customers and even lead to cart abandonment.

When managing WooCommerce stores, we’ve found that strategically limiting payment options can improve conversion rates and simplify the checkout process. For example, you might want to disable certain payment methods based on shipping locations, product types, or even order totals.

The good news is that you can use WooCommerce’s default settings or a plugin to control which payment methods your customers can use. You just need to know where to look and which settings to adjust.

In this guide, we’ll show you several proven ways to disable payment methods in WooCommerce. We’ll cover many different scenarios, whether you want to remove payment options completely or conditionally hide them based on specific rules.

When to disable WooCommerce payment methods

Managing payment gateways rcs database in WooCommerce isn’t just about offering as many payment options as possible. Sometimes, you need to restrict payment methods to improve your business operations and avoid high transaction fees.

Limiting the available payment methods can actually improve the customer journey, as offering too many options at checkout can be confusing.

In our experience, keeping it simple with just Stripe for credit cards and PayPal works best for most international stores.

However, if you’re serving specific markets with local payment preferences, you may need more control over when and how you display different payment options.

Here are common scenarios where you might want to disable a WooCommerce payment:

• Cart Total – For example, you can require specific payment methods for larger orders. This can help reduce transaction costs for payment gateways that charge percentage-based fees. Or, you can disable cash on delivery for high-value orders.
• Customer location – Some payment gateways only work in specific regions, so you may need to hide them from customers who live outside of those areas. Similarly, some payment gateways charge more in specific regions, so you may not want to offer them in certain regions.
• User Role – You can configure payment gateways based on user roles, such as offering wholesale customers different payment options than regular buyers. Again, this can be useful for reducing transaction fees or the risk of orders with higher price tags.
• Special periods – You may need to change your payment options during holiday sales events , especially if these payment methods may delay order processing.

With that said, let’s look at five different ways to disable payment gateways on your WooCommerce store.

You can use the quick links below to jump to your preferred method:

Option 1: Disable Payment Methods Using WooCommerce Settings (For All Customers)

WooCommerce actually has built-in they paid little money there settings for disabling payment methods, so you won’t need to install a WooCommerce plugin for this approach. That said, the steps here will depend a bit on what you want to do.

We’ll show you how to disable your main payment methods, PayPal-specific options, and Stripe methods. That way, all your bases are covered.

Please note that we recommend following only one of the methods in this section if you want to completely disable a payment option for all customers .

This is because these methods do not allow you to hide payment options based on specific criteria, such as user roles or product categories.

How to disable your primary payment methods

You can disable one of your main clean email payment methods (such as an entire payment gateway or direct bank transfers) directly in your WooCommerce settings.

Simply go to WooCommerce » Settings . Then, navigate to the “Payments” tab. There, you will see all the payment gateways available in WooCommerce .

We enable the following payment methods: Stripe for credit and debit cards, direct bank transfer, check payments, cash on delivery and PayPal.

Here’s what checkout looks like for customers when all of these options are enabled:

To disable a WooCommerce payment, simply click the toggle button under the “Enabled” column for any active payment method.

Now the payment option will no longer appear on your checkout page.

If you decide to activate some of these payment methods again later, you can always return to this page to reactivate them.

When you access the checkout page, you will no longer see the disabled payment methods:

How to disable PayPal alternative payment methods

If you have multiple payment methods enabled through PayPal, you can also easily restrict them. For example, your business may not be able to accept payments through Venmo , so you may want to disable that option.

First, you can use the same method we discussed above.

Go to WooCommerce » Settings » Payments . Then you can click the toggle button for any payment method labeled ‘(via PayPal)’.

Alternatively, you can click the “Manage” button next to the PayPal option.

This will take you to the PayPal settings page.

On the PayPal settings page, scroll down until you find the “Alternative payment methods” section.

In the “Disable Alternative Payment Methods” field, enter the WordPress- specific payment methods you want to hide from your checkout page.

Once you have made your choices, scroll down and click “Save Changes.”

Now the chosen payment methods will be disabled.

At this stage, you can go to the checkout page to see if the alternative payment methods have disappeared.

Here’s what happens if we disable the option for credit or debit cards as an alternative payment method for PayPal:

Note: PayPal automatically shows your customers alternative payment methods that are specific to their location. For example, customers in the Netherlands will see iDEAL as a payment option, while customers in other regions will only see payment methods that are relevant to their location.

How to disable Stripe-enabled payment methods

When you use Stripe as your payment gateway in WooCommerce, it automatically enables multiple payment options. These include credit cards, debit cards, and even some local payment options based on your region, such as Alipay and WeChat.

To improve the customer experience, you may want to restrict payment methods to only those your customers actually use.

This way, people don’t get confused or accidentally run into problems after choosing a method that won’t work for them.

To do this, go to WooCommerce » Settings » Payments . Then click on the “Manage” button next to the Stripe option.

On the next page, scroll down to the “Payments accepted on checkout” section.

Here you can disable payment methods by unchecking the ones you don’t want to offer.

Stripe offers several payment gateways on WooCommerce, including Apple Pay , Google Pay , Alipay, Klarna, Affirm, and AfterPay.

Make sure you only enable the specific payment options that make sense for your business and your customers.

Once you have selected your preferred payment methods, scroll down and click “Save Changes.”

Note: Stripe displays payment methods based on your store’s currency settings. For example, SEPA Direct Debit will only appear as a payment option when your store is set to use EUR (Euro) as its currency.

Here’s what our checkout page looks like after disabling ACH Direct Debit and Alipay.