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WooCommerce isn’t Sending E-mails? Try These Troubleshooting Steps

Home Blog Blogging WooCommerce isn’t Sending E-mails? Try These Troubleshooting Steps
Being an ecommerce store owner, sending emails regularly to keep your customers informed about their payment status, order status and other things is one of the crucial factors to provide a best-in-class customer experience. Therefore, if your WooCommerce is not sending emails, it is important to analyze the issue and troubleshoot it as soon as you can.   In this article, we will discuss a few troubleshooting steps you can follow to resolve this issue of WooCommerce emails not being sent. Before that, let’s understand how WooCommerce sends emails.  

How WooCommerce sends emails?

The wp_mail() function, an integral part of WordPress, is responsible for sending out emails in WooCommerce. While sending an email, WooCommerce calls the wp_mail() function and then the request is sent to WordPress.   At this stage, PHP passes communication to a local email server (in your web server). So, ideally, WooCommerce uses your web server for sending an email. You can use these default email settings of WooCommerce for managing your store’s basic email requirements.  However, for the advanced email features, you can even integrate email customizer plugins 

Why WooCommerce may not be sending emails? 

There could be instances where your WooCommerce emails are not being sent promptly from your website. Below, we will examine the probable reasons behind this issue and what steps you can take to resolve it.  

1. The specific email may not be enabled 

In the WooCommerce email settings, you need to enable different transactional emails as per their order status. In case you have disabled any email by mistake, emails won’t be sent for those transactions. (ADD IMAGE) 

2. The order status is ‘Pending Payment’ 

If the status of any order is ‘Pending Payment’, WooCommerce will not send emails. This may happen when a customer clicks the ‘Place Order’ button and then decides to not go ahead with the purchase. In this case, the order status will remain pending, and no email will be sent. This can even happen when there’s an issue with your payment gateway, herein, despite the completion of payment, the payment status doesn’t change to ‘Processing’ or ‘Completing’.   If this happens in your ecommerce store, you will have to get in touch with the support team of the payment gateway that is causing this issue. Conflicts with the plugins can also be an underlying reason for WooCommerce not sending emails. In such a case, you can disable plugins one by one and check for potential conflicts to fix them. 

3. Customers are not receiving emails 

Another case may be that WooCommerce is sending out emails, but your customers are not receiving them. Probably, this is happening because the emails are going to the spam folder due to IP address backlisting or issues in your email address or content.  

Address problems with WooCommerce transactional emails 

Transactional email is a type of non-promotional, automated email that is triggered by interactions, events or preferences within a service or application such as shipping notifications, purchase receipts, and more.   So, one solution to troubleshoot the issue of WooCommerce not sending emails with transactional emails is to use a plugin like WP Mail Logging by MailPoet to properly understand all the emails sent from your website. It will show all the errors (if any) in sending emails. If there are any issues, you’ll be able to fix them easily and ensure that the emails do not go to the spam folder.  Another option is to use an SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) plugin that will help you in sending emails instead of sending them from your hosting server. In this process, the request to send an email is transferred to the web server. Whereas, when you use an SMTP service provider, the request to send email from PHP will go to the SMTP provider, which helps you send emails from your website to the users. SMTP servers are especially configured to ensure that your emails reach the inbox of your users and do not end up in junk/spam folder.   Thankfully, there are multiple WordPress plugins that can help you integrate these SMTP providers with your website. 

List of  WordPress Plugins to Integrate SMTP Providers

  • Mailjet 
Mailjet offers a very powerful SMTP Relay service for helping you ensure great email deliverability on your WordPress website.  
  • Sendinblue 
Sendinblue offers an SMTP relay service for transactional emails. You will be able to view the detailed reports on the emails sent, how many emails were opened, bounce rate and more information.  
  • Postmark 
Postmark provides an SMTP service for helping enhance email deliverability on your WooCommerce store. It ensures better tracking of emails and has detailed documentation.  Hopefully, by now, you must have understood in detail the troubleshooting steps you can take to resolve the issue of WooCommerce emails not being sent.
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