WooCommerce email notifications are automated emails sent to customers and store admins to keep them informed about order statuses, account changes, and other important events.
These emails include order confirmations, shipping updates, password resets, and more. They are crucial for keeping customers engaged, reducing confusion, and building trust by providing clear communication about their purchases.
For store owners, they help track sales, manage inventory, and ensure smooth order fulfillment.
Let’s show you where you can find these settings. You need to hover your mouse over Woocommerce located in the left sidebar menu.
Then you have to click on settings and wait for the page to load. Once that page is finished loading, you then need to click on emails.
1. Email Notification List
You will be presented with a list of up to 12 email notifications that are already created for you. There is not much that you have to do here, but we believe it will be a good idea to explain to you what each email does.
New order
The “new order” email will be sent to the chosen recipient to notify them of any new orders that were made in the store. In most cases, the store manager will be the recipient. The store manager will then need to process the order and notify the courier company.
Cancelled order
A canceled order will be sent whenever the customer cancels an order that was previously marked as “processing” or “on-hold”, the store manager will then receive a notification of the cancelation.
Failed order
For failed orders two notifications are sent when orders are marked failed if they were previously pending or on-hold)
The first notification will be sent to your chosen recipient which in this case will be the store manager.
The second notification will be sent to the customer explaining that their order was unsuccessful due to a payment issue, with instructions to try again with a different payment method.
Here are some of the reasons why an order can be marked as failed.
- The card has been declined. The first reason is that the customer’s card was declined meaning, the customer needs to solve the problem at their bank.
- An authentication issue with your payment processor. Your store cannot connect with PayFast or any other processor. To fix this, you need to make sure that your confirmation details are correct.
- A duplicate transaction was submitted. If the same order was submitted several times in a short period of time that can be a potential indicator of fraud.
Please visit this article for more details on failed orders.
Order on-hold
The order on-hold email will be sent to the customer reminding them to make the purchase. For this email, the stock is reduced but the store is still awaiting payment from the customer.
For example, the direct bank transfer payment method will create an order with the status of “Order on-hold”
Processing order
This “processing order” notification will be sent to the customer containing the order details once the payment is made. Whenever the order reaches this status, the order will then need to be shipped to the customer.
Completed order
The Completed order email will be sent to the customer once the product has been delivered to their shipping address.
Refunded order
For “Refunder order”, the customer will receive an email telling them that their order has been refunded. This email is both set for full and partial refunds.
Order details
The “Order details” email will be sent once you manually create an order for the customer. Their invoice will be created along with a link to purchase the product. We will show you later how this is done.
Customer note
For “customer note” you can send a private and custom email to any customer who has an order open in your store. You can create a note when managing the order and send it to them.
Reset password
The reset password email will be sent to the customers when they want to reset the password to their account.
New account
The “new account” email will be sent to first-time customers, whenever they sign up through the checkout process or through the account page.
2. Managing Notification Emails
You can manage each email by going to the Manage button located to the right of the email you want to manage. You will then be sent to a page where you can do the following.
You can enable or disable the email by clicking on the checkbox.
You can also change the recipient’s email address which in this case is the store manager. Keep in mind that it is always a good idea to create your own unique email address that is domain-based.
You can edit the subject line of the email, and the email heading and also add a short note to the email for any custom instructions.
Under email type, we leave it as HTML. Next, you need to click on “save changes”.
3. Email Sender and Template Options
The next step is going to be to set up your email sender and template options. First, you need to change the “from name” field to that of your business name.
The “from address” needs to be set to that of the store manager’s email. This information will be displayed in the outgoing email notifications so that your customers will know where it is coming from.
Next, we will customize the email template. You can see how the email is going to look by clicking on the “Click here to preview your email template.” link. You can click on this link to see the changes that you made to the template.
The header image would be the first thing that we would want to change. Make sure that you use a different logo image that is not more than 200px in width. Upload the logo to your library.
First, hover your mouse over media and then click on library. Click on the image you just uploaded or click on the “add new media file” button to upload the image.
The image will open up once you click on it and then you have to copy the file URL.
The base color will be the same as your primary brand color. The rest of the settings we will leave as it is, but you are welcome to change any of the colors to suit your store.
Do not forget to click on the blue “Save changes” button after you are finished.