Getting started with CreditKit Pro
WooCommerce has no built-in store credit. CreditKit Pro adds it: one credit balance per customer account, a ledger row for every movement of that balance, and a Pay with Credits payment gateway that settles an order from the balance. Getting a store running takes five steps, and the whole path lives inside wp-admin. Before any of it, check three version requirements — PHP 8.1, WooCommerce 7.0 and WordPress 6.0 — because the PHP one stops activation outright. This page describes CreditKit Pro version 2.2.0 as shipped.
Does WooCommerce have store credit?
No. WooCommerce core ships coupons and refunds, and neither is a per-customer balance that a shopper can spend down over time. A coupon is a code that discounts an order, and a coupon holds no ownership link to one customer account. A WooCommerce refund returns money to the original payment method, which puts the amount back on the shopper’s card rather than into a balance at the store.
Store credit therefore arrives as an extension. CreditKit Pro stores each customer’s balance in the wp_pcs_user_credits table and writes every addition, spend, expiry and claw-back to wp_pcs_credit_transactions, so the balance is always reconstructible from the ledger. A daily reconciliation job re-checks each balance against that ledger. Debits use a conditional SQL update, so two simultaneous checkouts cannot overdraw one balance.
What’s the difference between store credit and a gift card?
A gift card is a code, and whoever holds the code can redeem it. A credit balance belongs to a WordPress user account, so the balance follows the customer’s login rather than a string that can be forwarded, resold or guessed. That difference shows up in what a store owner can do afterwards: a balance can be topped up, reduced, expired on a schedule, reported on per customer and pooled into a team budget, while a spent gift-card code is finished.
The ledger is the second difference. Every CreditKit Pro movement carries a type such as purchase, bonus, spend, refund or expiry, plus the order it relates to, so a support agent can answer “where did these credits come from” from the admin screens. CreditKit Pro sells credits as a WooCommerce product through the Credit Bundle product type, which means tax, coupons and reporting work the way they do for any other product in the catalogue.
Requirements
| Requirement | Minimum | Tested up to | What happens below the minimum |
|---|---|---|---|
| PHP | 8.1 | Not declared | WordPress disables the Activate link and prints the PHP requirement on the Plugins screen. |
| WooCommerce | 7.0 | 9.4 | CreditKit Pro loads nothing and shows an admin notice naming the required version. |
| WordPress | 6.0 | 6.7 | WordPress blocks activation from the Plugins screen. |
| WooCommerce installed and active | Required | — | Activation stops on an error page telling the store owner to install WooCommerce first. |
The PHP floor is the requirement that most often stops an install. CreditKit Pro declares Requires PHP: 8.1 in its plugin header, and WordPress reads that header before activating anything, so a store on PHP 8.0 sees a disabled Activate link rather than a broken site. Ask the host to move the site to PHP 8.1 or later, then activate. The WooCommerce floor of 7.0 is checked at runtime instead: CreditKit Pro loads its own admin notice and stays dormant rather than fataling.
Two WooCommerce compatibility flags are declared on every load. CreditKit Pro declares custom_order_tables, so High-Performance Order Storage can be switched on with no extra step. CreditKit Pro also declares cart_checkout_blocks and registers Pay with Credits as a Blocks payment method, so a store on the block-based Cart and Checkout keeps the credit balance, the per-line credit breakdown and the credit total in the cart.
The five-step path
- Install and activate CreditKit Pro with WooCommerce already active. Activation creates the
wp_pcs_*tables, seeds the security defaults and inserts 7 starter credit bundles. - Enter the licence key on Credit System → License to receive plugin updates.
- Work through Credit System → Settings, which has tabs for General, Features, Purchase Options, Display, Rewards, Advanced and Shortcodes. Features is where optional modules such as Groups and Budgets are switched on, and Groups and Budgets ships off.
- Edit the starter bundles on Credit System → Credit Bundles, setting the credit amount and the price for each one. Delete any bundle that does not fit the store.
- Confirm Pay with Credits on WooCommerce → Settings → Payments, then place one test order. The gateway registers enabled, so the main task is checking the title and description a shopper sees.
Give a test customer a balance before that last step. Open Credit System → User Credits, select the customer, then use Add credits on the customer’s history screen. Buying a bundle as the customer is the alternative, and it exercises the purchase path end to end.
What you’ll see after activation
A Credit System menu appears in wp-admin with Dashboard, Credit Bundles, User Credits, Transactions, Reports, Rewards, Security, API & Webhooks, License and Settings. Security holds the fraud, spending-limit, blocked-user and backup tabs. Transactions is the store-wide ledger view, and User Credits is the per-customer view.
On the storefront, a Credits tab appears in My Account directly after Orders, showing the balance, the ledger and the bundles on sale. The label is editable in Settings, and the tab can be hidden. Two further account tabs exist: My Limits shows the customer’s spending tier and remaining daily allowance for every logged-in customer, and My Team appears only for a customer who belongs to a team while Groups and Budgets is on. Shortcodes such as [pcs_credit_balance] and [pcs_credit_bundles] place the same information on any page, and the Shortcodes tab in Settings lists them all.
WooCommerce → Settings → Payments gains the Pay with Credits gateway. The method appears at checkout when the cart will actually be settled in credits, meaning the cart holds a credits-only item or every item is either-mode and the shopper has flipped the cart toggle. A customer whose balance is short still sees the method, together with the number of further credits needed, rather than a payment that fails. Products resolve to credits-only, money-only or either from the variation, then the parent product, then the product category, then the store default.
What to read next
The installation guide covers upload, activation and the licence step in more detail. The settings reference documents every option on the seven tabs. The refunds guide explains the three separate ways a refund can put credits back. Teams, budgets and approval thresholds are in the groups and budgets guide, and the REST API reference lists the 20 routes under the pcs/v1 namespace.