I want to get an array of the terms (categories) of WC products. But I want to get them in the same order I ordered them in the Admin area, that is in Products > Categories…

So, at first I wrote this piece of code and expected it to work:

$categories = get_terms(array(
    'taxonomy' => 'product_cat',
    'orderby' => 'term_order',
    'order' => 'ASC',
));

Then I noticed in the manual that:

‘orderby’

(string) Field(s) to order terms by. Accepts:

• term fields (‘name’, ‘slug’, ‘term_group’, ‘term_id’, ‘id’, ‘description’, ‘parent’, ‘term_order’). Unless $object_ids is not
  empty, ‘term_order’ is treated the same as ‘term_id’.

So I edited the code above to:

$categories = get_terms(array(
    'taxonomy' => 'product_cat',
    'object_ids' => get_terms(array(
        'taxonomy' => 'product_cat',
        'fields' => 'ids',
    )),
    'orderby' => 'term_order',
    'order' => 'ASC',
));

but this time I get an empty array…

So after even more careful reading I noticed that the bold part of the quote in the manual refers to $object_ids which are obviously different than $term_ids. In fact $object_ids exist as a column (object_id) in wp_term_relationships table and their value is totally different from the next column in the table (term_taxonomy_id)… So what’s the story here?

How do I get the $object_ids of the terms I’m interested in, in an ordered way? This gets more complicated than I originally anticipated, and it gets frustrating too, because googling the keywords get_terms term_order returns a whole bunch of results on this and other websites, where none of the proposed solutions seem to work. Some of them mention the use of a filter to get_terms_orderby, to forcefully instruct WP to use the desired ordering param, etc…

So, anyone figured this out? TIA.