Turn off shipping confirmation emails premanently

Shopify Discussion
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I am the web developer for store sitkasalmonshares.myshopify.com and we are experiencing an issue that has been a pain for quite a long time. We are unable to understand how to turn off shipping confirmation email notifications in Shopify. In the settings, the shipping confirmation description makes it sound like you can turn it off: “Sent automatically to the customer when their order is fulfilled (if you select this option).” But there seems no way to select or deselect it. If this is a feature you have to pay a higher price to turn off that would be quite confusing to me as that really shouldn’t be a super-premium feature.

Sitka Salmon Shares is a company that, once you purchase our product, you sign up for several months and have several shipping dates. We can’t let Shopify send out any shipping confirmation emails automatically because we are not shipping the product immediately as we fulfill these orders in Shopify. So whenever Shopify sends an order confirmation email to a customer it just serves to confuse them and be a real annoyance for our customer service team. Please help us find a solution to this issue, we really need these notifications turned off entirely, permanently.

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Hey, @sitkashares !

Lulu here from the Shopify Support team. Thanks for reaching out here, and I’ll be more than happy to help you out.

Great question! At the moment, you can only disable the shipment out for delivery and shipment delivered notifications from Admin > Settings > Notifications. This will apply to all future customer emails.

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We also have a guide on this is our help centre here which includes other order notifications that you can switch off too.

I hope this helps but let me know if you have any other questions and I’d be happy to help.

Thank you,

Lulu

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That’s not really an answer to my question. We need our shipping confirmation emails disabled. Why are we not able to do so?

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Hi, @sitkashares .

Thanks for getting back to me. I believe it is not possible to disable this notification as the shipping confirmation is important for 90% of our merchants. You can untick the option in the order directly but this has to be done manually to each order:

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I will be happy to pass your feedback on to our developers though. At Shopify, we pride ourselves on the continued growth and development of our platform, and we are only able to strive towards this goal with feedback and comments from merchants just like you. There is never a guarantee that a request will get a Green Light, or make it to a product launch, but we really do appreciate you reaching out with your suggestion, as I’m sure you’re not the only merchant with this request.

Kind regards,

Lulu

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I did some digging before I made this post. There is a similar question asked and Shopify customer service responded saying that they could put in requests but there’s no promise what happens in development. Many of the users in your Shopify community were unhappy, as you can read for yourself:

https://community.shopify.com/c/Shopify-Discussion/Disable-order-confirmation/td-p/493291

You say that this option works as-is for 90% of your customers; are you saying the other 10% serve an insignificant portion of Shopify’s incoming revenue? Is there no way to just assist us in turning this setting off permanently for our shop? I suppose we will put in a request for adding this feature, but if I can give no estimated time of delivery on such a feature then you’re not really providing us with anything we need in this situation.

Are you going to allow 10% of your customers to be unhappy with the functionality of their Shopify store? If so, I guess I can’t expect anything to happen for us and we will pursue a drastically more costly and time-consuming solution. Not sure why we would be forced to take that path, but you aren’t assisting me with any workable solution.

Please put in the request for the feature, but without knowing if or when it could possibly be implemented it really doesn’t make much of a difference. Thank you for your time, but we remain unsatisfied with your response.

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Hi Lulu,

Is there a way to customize the shipping confirmation email that goes to customers? The problem right now is that it is confusing because it says customers can track their order, but our system is not set up to transmit tracking information to Shopify. If we could customize what is sent to customers, we could clear up that confusion and it wouldn’t be as bad that the emails are sent.

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We echo the issue of wanting to turn order confirmation off. This is horrible UX on shopify’s end to force us into using all of the notifications without an on/off function. This has been a problem in discussion threads for months and the shopify team has shown no promise of updating it.

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Even though you cannot disable the notifications, you can turn the notifications into anything that you want. This is how we solved the issue for our shop.

In our Shopify admin we went to SETTINGS then NOTIFICATIONS. We realized that we needed to edit the ORDER CONFIRMATION template and the SHIPPING CONFIRMATION template in order to solve all of the issues with false shipping confirmations.

First we clicked on ORDER CONFIRMATION.

We changed the subject line to “Thank you for your order {{name}}”.

In the body, anywhere that it mentioned shipping or delivery, we changed to: “Hi {{ customer.first_name }}, this is your order confirmation. Please review the details below and let us know immediately of any errors by replying to this email.

You will receive another e-mail shortly letting you know that your order has been sent to production. You have 24 hours to make changes or to cancel your order.”

Then we clicked on the SHIPPING CONFIRMATION template.

We changed the subject line to: Your order {{ name }} is being processed

In the body, anywhere where it said: {% capture email_title %}_____________, we kept the beginning of each title sentence and changed the ending to “your order is being processed”. For example: " {% capture email_title %}The last items in your order are being processed{% endcapture %}"

Also in the body we edited the what was written after the “body” code for each, which is this code: {% capture email_body %}_________ We again kept the beginning of the sentence and replaced the rest with: “Your order is being processed. We will notify you when your order has shipped”.

*Making sure to keep all code exactly the same, and keeping the beginning of each sentence depending on the purpose of the code. For example, “The last items in your order are being processed” or “Some items in your order are being processed”

We’re not experts. But we hope this helps anyone else trying to solve this issue. This has worked great for us.

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Any update here? Shipping confirmation emails may be important for your merchants but the overwhelming majority of them will not ship through Shopify’s tools and can send their shipping confirmation emails through whichever tool they use for shipping and processing.

Kind of mind-boggling that you force this on people with the ridiculous limitations. As far as I’m concerned, it may be more important for 90+% of your merchants to have flexibility it how they do things.

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I had this same concern when I launched my store, and believe I found how to fix it.

Under Settings > Checkout > Order fulfillment, you can choose to manually or automatically fulfill orders. If you want Shopify to automatically fulfill you order, but not notify the customer, you can de-select the box below.

Hope that helps with your specific concern

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Thank you @crondos !

I was having the same problem as I have both physical and digital products listed on my store - digitals obviously get sent straight away automatically however I don’t want shipping confirmation emails for physical products going out to customers prematurely when they haven’t yet been posted. I don’t mind if all orders are automatically marked as fulfilled on my end (not ideal but manageable - would love to see the option to toggle this on/off for each product/item) but unselecting that pesky ‘notify customers of their shipment’ button will save me some serious headaches in the future.

Thanks again! :slightly_smiling_face:

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+1 for the ability to decide what emails & SMS I send.

I’m part of the 10% of Shopify stores who want control over how often and how I contact customers.

Did you see that the Shipping Confirmation can send BOTH email and SMS?

People get enough emails & texts; having extra messages forced on 'em isn’t what any of us want.

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Be sure to update the SMS outgoing message as well. We’ve updated ours to “Your order from {{ shop.name }} is being processed. We will notify you when your order has shipped.”

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I would just like to add my support to adding this optionality, we run several different marketplaces through shopify and every marketplace has different C/S requirements. Even just sending out an email increases the complexity of our Customer Service by opening up another channel for general inquires that we then have to dedicate manpower to monitor.

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Hi, I’m not sure about that. Once I fulfilled the order, the confirmation email automatically sent out.

Have you tested? Did I miss any steps of setting?

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Just tried your approach. I hope it helps. I do a lot of services and since shopify don’t really give me the option to list services I have to create them as products which generates all this emails about shipment but services don’t have shipments.

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Did you ever find a solution for a workaround? This is so mind-boggling that it can’t be done.

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How is this response in any way, shape or form sufficient?

It makes zero sense to not give the optionality to turn off those horrible emails by shopify. We can see how they can be of use, but forcing them onto the shopify customers is just a nuisance.

Still waiting for a solution to this problem.

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Absolutely we should be able to shut this down. It is rather mind boggling that 10% of Shopify customers do not matter to them. And I would guess that many more would like it turned off but just live with it.

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I have an e-commerce clothing retail business. So, I am part of the 90%.
But I disagree with shopify that I need their notifications. I am almost
sure the majority of the 90% rather have their notifications set up
properly using the proper email marketing platforms such as mailchimp,
omnisend etc.

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