The Block based Checkout form in WooCommerce is now secondary to the Express Checkout payment buttons (e.g. Apple Pay). Those express methods need to control all fields on the checkout form, so changing checkout fields actually breaks those.
The Checkout Block has a bunch of settings too, like making the phone number required or hidden, things that you don’t want to be messing-up with code.
Here’s what you can replace custom checkout fields with:
- Post checkout survey on the Thank You page
- Data you collect on product page as they’re adding to cart and store as cart item metadata eventually becoming order item metadata
- Cart page wall where you require a form be submitted to continue, adding the data into a cart line item with metadata or order metadata, either of which you can require to permit checkout if somebody tries to bypass
- Pop-up form that stores the fields as order metadata or adds a cart item with metadata, either of which you can require to permit checkout if somebody tries to bypass
- My Account custom sections and fields, including order actions, custom menu items, custom profile fields, all kinds of things there
- Email marketing including welcome and customer journey campaigns that engage the audience shortly after their purchase
Plus, in an absolute hard case you could hijack the existing Customer Note field for other purposes. That’s a route of last resort!
