There are times when you want to do some action like sending the order info to another database or third party integration before payment took place. of course, after payment took place, you might still initial another type of hook which is not explain here, there are tons of them if you google around. However, before a payment is made and after a checkout is place, an order is created. This hook is often ignored and not mention around. And this is the Woocommerce hook i am going to demonstrate here.
2 Woocommerce action hook after an order is made
There are actually two action hook that you can use here which are
woocommerce_checkout_order_processed woocommerce_new_order
Both this hook, allows you to initial your custom function immediately after an order is made such as the one below,
add_action( 'woocommerce_checkout_order_processed', 'my_status_pending', 1, 1 );
or
add_action( 'woocommerce_new_order', 'my_status_pending', 1, 1 );
Do bear in mind that the priority here is placed at the highest as compare to the default 10. If you just use the default priority, the chances of your payment getting directly marked as paid rather than going through the normal process of Woocommerce is high. It happens to me as i couldn't figure out how come all order are being marked as paid without going through any payment selected. It is all due to the action hook used above which you have to take note of the priority to prevent yourself losing money due to unpaid invoice marked as paid automatically.
New order hook
The argument parameter is marked as 1 which is the default since we only really need the order id of the hook as shown below,
add_action( 'woocommerce_new_order', 'my_status_pending', 1, 1 );
function my_status_pending($order_id){
// do your magic here
}
Do remember to NOT place any $woocommerce->cart->empty_cart() sentence within these methods as it will remove the item in the cart and leave other checkout method unable to proceed further. Leave the empty_cart instruction to the payment gateway to handle it.