Resend order confirmation issue

[KimM]

Help!

I have been running a Shopify store for a couple of years now and no issues. Occasionally I get a call from a customer who has not received an order confirmation email (usually it has gone to their spam or junk email) but I can go into their order, go to the thread in the timeline and resend the confirmation if necessary. Today a customer called querying where the order confirmation was, but I noticed in the timeline that it was never sent - I have never seen this before! I checked the email address with them, all good, but the issue is, how can I resend the confirmation? Usually there is a button in the timeline, but if the first confirmation has not been sent, you cant click that button as its not there. There is nothing in the drop down menus either.

Any suggestions?

Regards KIM

[Kimi]

Hi, @KimM!

This situation can happen if the customer went through checkout, and successfully paid for their order, without inputting their email address in the process. An order confirmation sent via email from the Shopify admin would only be done if there was an email address attached to the order when in was initially placed. If an email address was added in after the order has been placed, the system won't be able to subsequently send one through. You also won't have the option to resend an email order confirmation if one was never sent through in the first place for that same order.

If the order was created through a Draft order, and the customer account had no email address added to it when the Draft order was initially created, then the same logic applies as above.

If the customer is wanting a confirmation of their order, you could email them a manual invoice of their order. At this stage there isn't a way within the Shopify admin natively to resend an order confirmation email if none was sent through in the first place. I definitely do see how being able to do this is a useful option to have within our admin though, so I will send this as a feature request to our developers. We're constantly looking to improve our platform, so perhaps this is something we can incorporate in the future. Please note that although I will be submitting this request, we're unable to track it as this is an internal process that our developer team oversees. However there's currently a public facing document that you can check for new features that has been added to Shopify, you can access that website here: Shopify Changelog.

[KimM]

Thanks so much for looking into this. I have sent the customer a manual invoice as you suggested.

The customer was new and placed a phone order. He knew what he wanted so gave me the product name first, so I created the draft order, then asked for his customer details. I added/created the new customer from the Draft order, so perhaps that was the issue, although I did all this before taking payment and putting the order through. It is strange, because I thought I had done this before and it had been fine. Next time maybe I will create the customer first, then go into Draft Orders and create the order - that should be ok I guess. Sometimes though it’s just about quickly responding to your customers needs rather than fussing around and asking for all the details beforehand. I think it would be a good addition to remedy this issue.

[Kimi]

No worries at all, @KimM. I can totally understand your perspective there, too. Like you say, sometimes as business owners we'd just like to attend to customers as quickly as we can! Some details can definitely be missed in the process of creating an order manually too, and I've definitely done this before myself.

I find that it's best practice to include the customer's email address onto their order, even if they've given you their contact number to attach to the order. This will ensure that if the customer will ever need an email copy of their order confirmation, you'll be able to re-send one easily from within the order page if the email address was already inputted to begin with!

[mikeyonaboat]

@Kimi did this ever come through ? still a big issue and seems relatively simple to fix? for example, maybe it's prepopulated when you click contact the customer

[Kimi]

Hi, @mikeyonaboat.

Any feedback we share with our team is prioritised based on the needs of our merchants at large.

Shopify is ever-growing and constantly looking to better our platform, which is made possible with feedback we receive from merchants like yourself. As this happens on a large scale, it may take time for our team to go through all feedback and ship out any relevant updates or new features to the platform.

In saying this, I’ll go ahead and pass on the feedback that you've shared here with us to our developers too. Feel free to save our changelog here so you can keep an eye out for any new updates to our platform.