Catalog Mode — from lookbook to closed shop

Not every WooCommerce site is meant to take money. A showroom, a trade catalog, a portfolio of made-to-order pieces, a shop between seasons — all of them want the product data, the categories and the search, but not the checkout.

The extension covers that with two layered switches plus two options that make the result presentable. All of them live under Unyson+ → WooCommerce → Shop Behavior.

Switch	What it is
Catalog Mode	Presentational. Hides prices and add-to-cart buttons.
Disable Purchasing	Functional. Makes the store genuinely un-buyable.
Enquiry Button	Puts a link where the add-to-cart button used to be.
Closed-Shop Message	Replaces the Cart / Checkout page with a message instead of a redirect.

Which do I want?

If you want a lookbook that looks right, Catalog Mode alone is enough. If it matters that nobody can order — a price list for trade customers, a shop that is genuinely closed — turn on Disable Purchasing too. Catalog Mode on its own is a visual change, and a determined visitor can work around it.

Catalog Mode

Turning it on hides the commerce affordances everywhere:

Specifically, it unhooks the four WooCommerce templates that print prices and cart buttons:

Removed	Hook
Loop add-to-cart button	woocommerce_after_shop_loop_item
Loop price	woocommerce_after_shop_loop_item_title
Single-product price	woocommerce_single_product_summary (10)
Single-product add-to-cart	woocommerce_single_product_summary (30)

It also reaches the extension's own elements — a Products grid placed on a page drops its price and cart slots too. That matters: those cards call the WooCommerce loop template directly rather than going through the archive hooks, so without this a "lookbook" would still be selling from every page-builder grid on the site.

Catalog Mode alone does not stop orders

It hides the buttons; it does not close the store. A crafted ?add-to-cart=123 URL, a cached AJAX button in someone's browser, or a bookmarked /cart/ all still work, because the products are still purchasable as far as WooCommerce is concerned. If that matters, read on.

Disable Purchasing

The strict variant. With Catalog Mode and Disable Purchasing on, the store is properly out of commission:

• Every product reports itself non-purchasable (woocommerce_is_purchasable and the variation equivalent return false), so WooCommerce itself refuses to sell it.
• Add-to-cart validation refuses every route — the form post, the AJAX button, and the Store API all funnel through woocommerce_add_to_cart_validation.
• WooCommerce's own ?add-to-cart= request handler is unhooked before it runs and the request parameter scrubbed, so the URL trick does nothing at all.
• Price HTML resolves to an empty string store-wide (woocommerce_get_price_html), so third-party widgets, related-product blocks and anything else that prints a price go quiet too — not just the templates Catalog Mode unhooks.
• The Cart and Checkout pages redirect to the shop (or show a message — see below).

Shop-only page-builder elements — Cart icon, Mini Cart, Add to Cart button, Cart and Checkout — render nothing on the front end in this state. In the builder they show a short note explaining why, so an element that has gone blank does not look broken.

Existing orders keep working

The order-received and order-pay endpoints are deliberately left reachable. Someone who placed an order before you closed the shop can still see their confirmation and pay an outstanding order — closing the shop stops new orders, it does not strand old ones.

Enquiry Button

A lookbook still wants to hear from people. Turn on Enquiry Button, give it a Link (a contact page, or a mailto: address) and optionally change the Text, and a button appears in the exact slot the hidden add-to-cart vacated — on shop archives, on single products, and in the extension's own product cards.

The product comes along with the click, so the form on the other end knows what the enquiry is about:

https://example.com/contact/?product_id=42
                           &product=Harbor%20Canvas%20Tote
                           &product_url=https%3A%2F%2Fexample.com%2Fproduct%2Fharbor-canvas-tote%2F

A mailto: link gets the product as a subject line instead (Enquiry: Harbor Canvas Tote), since query args mean nothing to a mail client.

Prefilling a contact form

Most form plugins can read a query arg into a field's default value. With the Forms extension, add a hidden or text field and set its default from the product query arg — the enquiry then arrives already saying which product it is about, and the visitor never has to type a product name.

The button carries the classes button upwc-enquiry-btn and a data-product attribute with the product id, so it picks up your theme's button styling by default and is easy to target:

.upwc-enquiry-btn {
    /* your own treatment, if the theme's .button is not right */
}

Enquiry Link is required. Without it no button renders — a button that goes nowhere is worse than no button.

Closed-Shop Message

By default, Disable Purchasing bounces the Cart and Checkout pages to the shop. That is tidy but mute: someone who followed a link to the cart lands on the shop wondering whether they misclicked.

Put text in Closed-Shop Message and they get told instead, with a way back:

The message replaces the Cart / Checkout page content (at the_content priority 0, so it pre-empts the cart shortcode or block that would otherwise render), followed by a Continue browsing link back to the shop. Leave the field empty to keep the plain redirect.

Recipes

A trade catalog with no prices and an enquiry form

Setting	Value
Catalog Mode	On
Disable Purchasing	On
Enquiry Button	On
Enquiry Link	your contact page
Closed-Shop Message	(empty — nothing should link to the cart anyway)

A shop that is temporarily closed

Setting	Value
Catalog Mode	On
Disable Purchasing	On
Closed-Shop Message	"We are closed until 5 March — browse the collection and come back then."
Enquiry Button	Off

Prices stay hidden while you are closed, which avoids advertising a price you might change before reopening. If you would rather keep prices visible, leave Catalog Mode off — but note that Disable Purchasing applies only alongside it, so a "prices visible, ordering off" state is not a combination the switches offer today.

A lookbook that still shows prices

Not offered as a switch — Catalog Mode hides prices and cart buttons together. To show prices but no cart button, leave Catalog Mode off and remove the button in your theme:

add_action( 'wp', function () {
    remove_action( 'woocommerce_after_shop_loop_item', 'woocommerce_template_loop_add_to_cart', 10 );
    remove_action( 'woocommerce_single_product_summary', 'woocommerce_template_single_add_to_cart', 30 );
} );

Checking it from the outside

Worth verifying on a real store rather than trusting the switches:

1. Open a product page — no price, no add-to-cart.
2. Visit /?add-to-cart=<product id> — the cart stays empty.
3. Visit /cart/ — redirected to the shop, or shown your message.
4. If you have an enquiry button, click one and confirm the product arrives in the URL.