“Could you copy our accountant Jenny, on receipts for all my purchases? Thanks!”
Why is it so difficult to automate the sending of a Receipt to additional company contacts? Am I just missing something obvious? It’s insane to me that this platform is priced as it is with such basic functions out of reach.
I can create a metafield on a Company or Location, to store additional recipients for an order. Great! But guess what? Shopify Flow can only send one of 2 store notifications (using a store From/ReplyTo email address instead of [email removed] Send order invoice, or Send draft order invoice… Both are invoices and will only fire if the order hasn’t been paid. So that’s extremely useful for all of our AP contacts who need a copy of the invoice to make payment. But any customer who doesn’t have terms (so they pay right away), but still needs their accounting department copied on their purchases… No dice. Flow could send them an email from the rather unprofessional-looking [email removed] address, or our sales rep has to remember to manually send them a receipt.
But even then - GUESS WHAT? There isn’t even a “Send a Receipt” option on the order itself. You can scroll down in the Order Timeline and View Email, click Resend on the original order confirmation, but only to yourself or the original recipient. And please don’t hit me with well you should install some third party app when what we’re talking about is SENDING A RECEIPT…. Somebody, please just tell me I’m crazy or dumb and not seeing the obvious answer here.
You are not missing anything. This is a real Shopify Plus B2B gap.
Today, Shopify treats the order confirmation as the receipt, and it is locked to the original recipient. Flow cannot send a branded receipt after payment, only invoices or draft invoices. Flow emails also come from flow@shopify.com, which is not suitable for customer accounting. There is also no native “send receipt” action on an order, even on Plus.
What merchants actually do:
Force invoices for everyone, even pay-now customers, just to include AP contacts
Manually forward confirmations, which does not scale
Build a small custom app or webhook that sends the order confirmation to additional emails using a branded sender
Flow alone cannot solve this. Store notifications cannot solve this. Metafields help store emails but not send receipts.
You are not crazy. The feature simply does not exist yet, and a lightweight custom app is currently the only clean solution without installing a marketplace app.
@bpaulette You’re not crazy at all this is a genuine Shopify limitation, especially for B2B. There’s no native way to send paid order receipts to additional recipients, Flow only handles unpaid invoices, order confirmations can’t be CC’d, and there’s no manual send receipt option to another email. For something this basic, it’s a surprising gap in Shopify’s workflow, not user error.
@bpaulette and @ArianaBryant, I’d assume such a feature to be quite basic for brands paying over 2k$ monthly for the B2B feature set.
Have you tried out the sidekick app generator already? I do realise it has a few limitations, but maybe it can work - (just my guess).
I can think of two ways - using Flows + Klaviyo / Omnisend or a lightweight custom app to push events into marketing tools per customers who need to be looped in when an order is placed for a company who doesn’t have terms set.
@Abel_Lesle I’ve got a pretty extensive custom app going already, covering a host of other shortcomings, some of which I was surprised weren’t covered out of the box, but many that are very specific to our day-to-day operations… but this is such a basic, glaring omission… at the price level of Plus, it’s ludicrous to have to do custom development to cover such a basic need.
100% agree with you on this. There are a lot of gaps in their feature set, and that’s what usually apps try to solve for.
Since you already have a dev partner who’s working with you for the custom app - it might be best to ask them to implement this for you on the app itself?
Just to add something that may be useful here: this type of setup can also be handled as an invoice sending workflow, rather than relying on Shopify’s native order confirmation.
Sufio supports custom invoice recipients, so invoices can be sent to multiple or alternative email addresses, for example, when a business customer has a designated billing email.
The recipient emails can be stored in Shopify as customer tags or customer metafields. For Shopify Plus B2B merchants, they can also be stored on Company or Company Location metafields.
Sufio can also send internal copies of automatically sent invoices to a store-side accountant, warehouse, team member, or another inbox if needed.
So this would not change Shopify’s native receipt/order confirmation behaviour, but it may help with the invoice-sending side of the B2B workflow.
I have been searching for a solution for the same problem, and am shocked Shopify considers this a B2B platform when we cannot send company receipts to the company accounting department.
I’ve seen mention of a few apps to help do this, but I already have 40+ apps installed. A few of these apps are for integrations, but most of them are trying to fix gaps in Shopify’s “B2B” solution. Every new app added risks slowing my store down or even possibly crashing it, plus the apps I looked at were overkill for this simple task.
WHY CAN’T WE SEND EXTERNAL EMAILS THROUGH FLOW? I would have solved this issue in minutes with Flow, except it won’t send email outside my domain.
Well technically you can send external emails, you just can’t use the off-the-shelf system notification as a “receipt”, and you can’t have it send dynamically like to {{ order.customer.email }} or address(es) stored in a metafield… Which is unfortunate, but if I had to guess, I’ll bet they just don’t want Flow to start getting abused as an all-purpose mail relay system.
But yeah, I’ve gone a long way since first posting this gripe back in Dec… Got tired of the limitations of Flow and 3rd party apps, and built us a custom app that covers a whole bunch of gaps including this one.
For the email receipt, I tied our app in to our MS365 environment, so now when a fulfillment happens, a webhook hits the app, the app checks for AP contacts stored in a company metafield, and if present the customer and all AP contacts get an email directly from their Account Executive with a PDF receipt attached. I’m also sending out payment due and past due notices in the same way, directly from the rep (so the reps see them in their sent items, and all follow-ups go straight to them). I know that doesn’t really help YOU right now, but it’s an approach you might consider
