WooCommerce 4.9.0 Released

We’re excited to announce that WooCommerce 4.9 is now released! This is the first minor release of 2021 and has

387 commits from 30 contributors in WooCommerce core.
169 commits from 25 contributors in the WooCommerce admin package.
91 commits from 14 contributors in the WooCommerce Blocks package.

This is a minor release, which means everything is backward compatible with the previous version.

As always, we recommend creating a backup of your site and making sure that themes and plugins are compatible before updating. You can check out this update guide for more information.

What’s new in 4.9?

WooCommerce Admin 1.8.3

This release updates the WooCommerce admin package to 1.8.3 from 1.7.0. Mostly bugfixes and stability improvements are included in this update, including:

Multiple compatibility changes are added for IE 11 including fixing an issue where sometimes the admin screen won’t render.
Stock management and reviews management panels have been moved to the WooCommerce home screen. These used to be accessed via icons on the right side of the navigation bar.
For stores based in India, another payment option Razorpay has been included in the onboarding task list.
We are introducing a new customer survey utility to gather feedback from users around various product features. This will only be shown to users who have opted in to share usage data with us.

WooCommerce Blocks 4.0.0

WooCommerce blocks package has been updated to 4.0.0 in this release from 3.8.1. This update contains changes to behind the scenes logic in checkout flow so that the flow in which data is processed is more logical, along with some other bugfixes and improvements.

You can also view detailed release notes for WooCommerce Blocks 4.0.0.

Notable fixes and improvements

API performance improvements: WooCommerce REST API responses have been made faster for product and order endpoints. To make use of increased speed, make sure to add the _fields parameter in the API call to specify only what you need, and WooCommerce will try to optimize internal SQL queries to reduce the load on the database. #27335

Note that we have reverted a part of this enhancement that was earlier included in the Beta after a bug was reported. We are intending to add this back in a future release after fixing the bug. #28745
UK and Isle of Man removed from EU VAT zones: As a part of the Brexit effort, we have removed UK and IM from EU VAT zones. If you or your client’s store deal with EU taxes, then make sure to consult your accountant as just this change might not be enough. #28538

We have also published a guide for navigating Brexit here: Ready for Brexit: A Guide for WooCommerce Store Owners
Stock management fixes: Fixes have been made to make stock management more robust and prevent duplicate stock reduction. Thanks to all for reporting those issues promptly and in great detail. #28620
Product review count: An issue related to incorrect review count has also been fixed. If you were impacted by this bug, then add/remove a product review manually to correct the review count. We are also working on another fix to update the product review count retro-actively for convenience. Again, thanks to all for reporting this issue promptly and in detail. #28624
Better coupon error messages: When the coupon usage limit is reached after an incomplete or failed payment where the coupon was used, we will show better error messages. If the users are logged in, we will ask them to go to the MyAccount page (if enabled) to cancel or pay for the orders and recover/utilize the coupon. #28592

You can find the complete changelog for this release in the changelog.txt file.

Database Changes

This release does not introduce any changes to the database.

Template Changes

This release does not introduce any changes to template files.

Filters and actions

We have added two new actions in this release

Action	Description
woocommerce_variation_before_set_stock	Action to signal that the value of ‘stock_quantity’ for a variation is about to change. #27558
woocommerce_product_before_set_stock	Action to signal that the value of ‘stock_quantity’ for a product is about to change.#27558

list of new actions in 4.9

Much 💜 to all the contributors

Finally a big thanks to everyone in the community who has contributed via issue reports, fixes, translation, testing, supporting other users, or simply spreading the word.