Order emails and documents

Order emails, under Shop, opens Emails and documents, with three tabs: Design, Emails and Documents. Header, footer and company details are shared by every email and every printed document: order emails, back-in-stock alerts, the subscriber welcome, invoices, receipts, packing slips and despatch notes.

Design sets the header style (your logo above a thin line, on a coloured band or above a wide picture), the logo size, the colours, which follow your website theme until you choose others, the font and the corners, and whether each item shows a small picture. The company details hold your company name and number, business address, footer text, sign-off, a disclaimer and up to five footer links.

Emails lists the order confirmation, the new order email to you, order sent, refund and cancellation, plus one for each of your stages. The order confirmation and the new order email are part of every order, so they always send; the others send when switched on.

Each email has its own subject, preview text, heading and paragraphs. Insert a detail adds things like the order number at the cursor. Order details shown picks the parts below the words: items, totals, delivery and contact, tracking and the customer's note; a part with nothing to show is left out by itself. Add a button and a footer note for that email only, preview it on a computer or a phone, and send a test to yourself.

Four documents are printed from each order. The invoice has its own number and is downloadable from the buyer's order page; it is a VAT invoice when the shop is VAT registered. The receipt shows what the buyer paid. The packing slip goes in the parcel, with prices only if you switch them on. The despatch note is for your packing bench: the address, the delivery method and what to pick.

Documents, in Shop settings, switches invoices on or off, sets the invoice number prefix (numbers follow on from the last, such as INV-0001), whether packing slips show prices, and a note for invoices and receipts and another for slips. Each invoice is numbered the first time it is made, in sequence for the website.

The Documents tab draws each document with a sample order, using your saved settings. Some browsers do not show PDFs inside a page: if the preview stays blank, open it in a new tab or download it.

From an order, Print opens the document as a PDF in a new tab, ready to print.