Prescription for WooCommerce – Medical Prescription Upload & Pharmacy Order Approval

Selling prescription medicine online comes down to three rules. The customer cannot check out without a prescription. Nothing ships before someone qualified has looked at it. And the prescription never ends up in a folder the public can open.

Prescription for WooCommerce plugin handles all three for online pharmacies, chemists and medical stores. Pick the products that need a prescription. Customers upload their Rx on the cart or checkout page, and the order waits in a holding status until your pharmacist approves or rejects it from the WooCommerce order screen.

Think of it as a prescription upload field and a pharmacy order approval step built into WooCommerce. A person on your team verifies every prescription. Prescriptions are never sent to an outside service. There is no AI scanning, no API key and no fee per prescription. Every file stays on your own server, in a private folder that only the customer and your reviewers can open.

Quick links

• View Demo
• View Pro Plugin Demo
• Documentation
• Support
• Upgrade to Pro

How it works

1. You choose which products need a prescription: whole categories, the entire store, or single products.
2. The customer adds a product and uploads a photo or scan of their prescription on the cart or checkout page.
3. WooCommerce creates the order and moves it to a holding status, such as On hold, so it is not fulfilled yet.
4. Your pharmacist opens the order, views the file and approves it, rejects it, or asks the customer for more information.
5. The customer gets an email, and the order moves to the status you picked, for example Processing after an approval.

What the free plugin does

Require a prescription for selected products

Not every product in a pharmacy needs a prescription. You decide where the rule applies, and customers see it before they add anything to the cart.

• Require a prescription for chosen product categories, or leave the list empty to require one for every product
• Exclude single products from a category rule
• Set any product to always require a prescription, never require one, or follow the category rule
• A “Requires Prescription” label on shop, category and product pages, with your own text and colours
• A short note for customers explaining what to upload
• Works with simple and variable products

Prescription upload field on the cart and checkout page

Customers attach their prescription where they are already buying. The upload box supports drag and drop, and you choose where it appears on each page.

• Upload box on the cart page, the checkout page and the order details page
• Works with the classic checkout and the WooCommerce Cart and Checkout blocks
• Accepts JPG, PNG, WEBP, HEIC, PDF, DOC and DOCX files
• Several files per order, up to a limit you set
• Guests and logged in customers can both upload at checkout
• Checkout is blocked on the server until a prescription is attached, so it cannot be skipped by turning off JavaScript or calling the Store API directly
• Attach Later lets logged in customers place the order now and upload the prescription from their order page afterwards

Pharmacy order approval: hold the order until a pharmacist approves

This is the part that keeps prescription medicine from shipping early. New prescription orders go to a holding status and stay there until someone makes a decision.

• Choose the holding status, such as On hold
• The hold stays in place even with Cash on Delivery, bank transfer and card gateways that would normally move a paid order straight to Processing
• Approve, reject or request more information from the WooCommerce order screen, with a message the customer can read
• Choose where the order goes on approval and on rejection
• Require a reason before a prescription can be rejected, so no customer is refused without an explanation
• Every decision written to the order notes

Prescription verification queue for your pharmacist

All orders with a prescription are in one place, so your pharmacist is not searching through every WooCommerce order.

• Orders screen with a tab for each prescription status: awaiting upload, pending review, approved, rejected and information requested
• Search by order number, billing email or customer name
• Prescription status column on the WooCommerce orders list
• Dashboard with orders awaiting review, approved, rejected and waiting on the customer, an activity chart, the status mix and the prescriptions that have waited longest
• Setup wizard that switches the workflow on in a few short steps

Private, secure prescription file storage

A prescription is a health record, so the plugin never leaves it in the public uploads folder.

• Files are saved to a private folder with a random name that is unique to your site
• The folder includes deny rules for Apache and IIS servers
• Files open only through a checked link, for the customer who uploaded them and for administrators and shop managers
• Anyone else who opens the link, even with the full URL, sees an Access denied page
• Prescription files are hidden from the Media Library for everyone except administrators

Prescription emails and customer re-upload

Customers know where their order stands without contacting you.

• Customer emails when a prescription is approved, rejected or needs more information, sent with your WooCommerce email template and including the reviewer’s message
• An email to the store when a new prescription is waiting for review
• Recipients, format and footer managed under WooCommerce > Settings > Emails
• Self Service shows a refused customer the reviewer’s message on their order page and lets them upload a new file there

There is no limit on orders, prescriptions, files or reviewers in the free version.

Who this is for

Online pharmacies and chemists selling prescription only medicine. Medical supply stores that need a doctor’s prescription for certain equipment. Optical stores that ask for a copy of the eye prescription before selling contact lenses. Any WooCommerce store where a qualified person has to check a document before an order is fulfilled.

The plugin collects and stores the prescription document and gives your team an approval workflow. It does not read the file automatically, and it does not replace the checks your local pharmacy rules require.

Free vs Pro

The free plugin covers the full workflow, from the upload at checkout to the approval email. Prescription for WooCommerce Pro is for pharmacies with more volume, a review team or stricter record keeping. It installs on top of the free plugin.

Faster prescription review (Pro)

• Review workspace with the file, the details and the decision side by side, zoom and rotate, and a jump to the next prescription without a page reload
• Approve or reject several orders at once from the Orders screen
• Saved replies for the refusal messages you write every day
• Pharmacist user role that can review prescriptions without shop manager access
• Assign prescriptions to a named pharmacist, set a review target in hours and see overdue badges

Prescription details and prescriber checks (Pro)

• Ask for the patient name and age, prescribing doctor, registration or licence number, date of issue and expiry date next to the upload box, and choose which are mandatory
• Prescriber registry to mark doctors as verified, on watch or blocked, with a warning when one appears on an order
• Prescriber verification link, a private expiring link the doctor can use to confirm the prescription without an account
• Duplicate warning when the same file was already used on another order

Repeat customers and refills (Pro)

• Prescriptions tab in My Account listing every prescription with its status and files
• Returning customers reuse an approved prescription at checkout instead of uploading again, counted against a refill allowance
• Approved prescriptions expire after a period you set, with a warning email before they lapse
• Reminder emails for orders still waiting for a prescription
• Maximum quantity of a controlled product per order

Records, emails and reports (Pro)

• Audit trail of every decision and an access log of who opened each file, with time and IP address
• Consent checkbox at checkout, with the wording, date and IP address stored on the order
• Data retention that deletes old prescription files, or files and patient details, on a schedule
• Email editor for the subject, heading and body of every customer email
• Pharmacy analytics with approval rate, review time, revenue approved and on hold, top prescribers and products, reviewer activity and refusal reasons
• CSV export of prescriptions

External services

This plugin does not send prescriptions, customer data or order data to any outside service. The bundled DevDiggers framework, which draws the admin screens, connects to the services below. All of them run only inside the WordPress admin.

1. DevDiggers extensions directory

• What it is: A read only API on devdiggers.com that returns the public list of DevDiggers extensions.
• What it is used for: Showing available DevDiggers extensions on the Extensions admin page.
• When data is sent: Only when a logged in administrator opens the Extensions admin page. The response is cached for 24 hours.
• What data is sent: A standard outbound HTTP request only, meaning your server’s IP address and a plugin user agent string. No personal data and no store data are sent. The page also loads each listed extension’s image from devdiggers.com in the administrator’s browser.
• Endpoint: https://devdiggers.com/wp-json/ddwcs/v1/plugins

2. Newsletter subscription (optional)

• What it is: A contact and newsletter endpoint on devdiggers.com.
• What it is used for: Adding your email address to the DevDiggers newsletter, only if you choose to subscribe.
• When data is sent: Only when an administrator submits the optional newsletter form in the plugin dashboard. Nothing is sent automatically.
• What data is sent: The email address you enter and your site URL.
• Endpoint: https://devdiggers.com/?fluentcrm=1&route=contact

The services above are provided by DevDiggers. By using them you agree to the DevDiggers Terms and Conditions (https://devdiggers.com/terms-and-conditions/) and Privacy Policy (https://devdiggers.com/privacy-policy/).

3. Gravatar (avatar images)

• What it is: Gravatar, the avatar service operated by Automattic.
• What it is used for: WordPress core’s get_avatar_url() shows the logged in administrator’s avatar in the plugin dashboard header. This is standard WordPress behaviour.
• When data is sent: Only when a logged in administrator opens the plugin dashboard and avatars are enabled under Settings > Discussion. Turning avatars off there stops the request.
• What data is sent: A hash of the administrator’s email address inside the image URL, plus the usual request data such as IP address and user agent.
• Endpoint: https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/
• Terms of Service: https://automattic.com/terms/
• Privacy Policy: https://automattic.com/privacy/

This plugin contains no licence checks, no update checks and no telemetry.

Source code and build tools

The admin and frontend JavaScript and CSS are compiled from the src/ folder with webpack and Babel. The complete, human readable source code, including all build configuration, is published in our public GitHub repository:

https://github.com/DevDiggers-Technologies/prescription-for-woocommerce

To build the assets from source:

1. Run npm install to install the build dependencies listed in package.json.
2. Run npm run build to compile the production assets into assets/js and assets/css.

The build configuration is in webpack.config.js and babel.config.js. Two third party libraries used by the admin screens ship unmodified under the MIT licence inside devdiggers-framework/assets/js/: Chart.js (https://www.chartjs.org) and Select2 (https://select2.org).