Why is my contact customer email template not working properly?

Technical Q&A

Topic summary

Users are experiencing issues with Shopify’s contact customer email template displaying corrupted or reversed text.

The Problem:

  • When clicking to email customers, saved template content (including HTML code) disappears
  • Upon reviewing emails, the message appears backwards/reversed with garbled text
  • Customers are receiving blank emails as a result

Current Status:

  • One user reports Shopify support has not provided a solution or backend fix
  • As a workaround, affected users are manually emailing customers through Gmail instead

Potential Solution:

  • One participant resolved the issue by creating a new notification template in the Shopify backend and remaking it from scratch
  • The original template appeared to be corrupted somehow
  • After recreating the template, functionality was restored

Resolution: Partially resolved through workaround; no official fix from Shopify confirmed.

Summarized with AI on November 22. AI used: claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929.
1

I am trying to contact my customers about their orders, but when I click on their email, in the contact customer box the Dear html code and all the information I have saved as the template is missing. And if I type out my message and click on “Review Email” my message is not there all that is shown is the following:

Dear Peggy Littleworth, We appreciate your patience! Thank you Annie & Company Needlepoint & Knitting To contact Needlepoint email: anniesneedlepoint@gmail.com To contact Knitting email: anniesknitting@gmail.com

I checked the template under Notifications>Contact Customer and the template is there as follows:

{% if billing_address.name %}Dear {{ billing_address.name }},{% endif %}

We appreciate your patience!

Thank you
{{ shop_name }}

To contact Needlepoint email: anniesneedlepoint@gmail.com
To contact Knitting email: anniesknitting@gmail.com

My customers are receiving blank emails. How can we fix this? Please Help!!

2

Hey, did you find a solution for this? We are having the same issue.

3

Unfortunately No, and Shopify hasn’t replied with a solution either or done
anything on their back end to fix it. We have just been emailing our
customers through Gmail.

4

So sorry for my late reply, have not been here for a while. Just in case someone stumbles upon the same problem, I simple made a new notification in the Shopify backend. My original template somehow was broken. So I remade it and after that it worked again.