Email notifications & automation
Choose which alerts you receive, send from your own domain, and edit the automatic emails your customers get.
Your store sends email on your behalf all day — order confirmations, shipping updates, back-in-stock alerts. Settings → Notifications and Email Automation are where you decide what goes out, to whom, and what it says.
Alerts for you
Under Settings → Notifications you choose which alerts land in your own inbox.
| Notification | What it tells you |
|---|---|
| New order | Someone bought something |
| Low stock | A product is running down and needs reordering |
| Tracking emails | Whether customers automatically get tracking details when an order ships |
| Contact form notifications | A customer sent a message through your storefront's contact form |
You also set the addresses used: the notification email where your alerts arrive, and the outbound email your store sends from.
Tip: Send order alerts to an address you actually watch. A notification sitting in an inbox nobody opens is the same as no notification.
Send from your own domain
By default your store's email goes out from a shared sending address. Set up an email domain and messages come from your own — orders@yourstore.com rather than something generic. It looks more professional, it's less likely to be filtered as spam, and replies come back to you.
Setting one up involves adding a few DNS records to your domain, the same place you pointed it at your store — see Connect a custom domain.
If YNS hosts your domain's DNS (managed DNS), there's nothing to add: YNS adds the records for you, and the email domain is usually verified within a few minutes. If another record already uses one of the names, Settings → Domains lists it as needing attention – contact us and we'll sort it out.
Email automation
Email Automation lists the automatic emails your store sends, so you can review and edit the wording — and switch any one of them off with the Send this email toggle at the top of the email.
| When it's sent | |
|---|---|
| Purchase confirmation | Right after an order is placed |
| Order shipped | When you mark an order as shipped |
| Order delivered | When delivery is confirmed |
| Order refunded | When you issue a refund |
| Ticket confirmation | When someone buys an event ticket |
| Cart abandonment reminder | When a shopper leaves a cart behind |
| Restock notification | When you notify people a product is back |
| Newsletter welcome | When someone subscribes, if the welcome email is on |
| Order withdrawal | For eligible EU withdrawal requests |
Some of these depend on the matching module being enabled — cart reminders need Abandoned Carts, restock alerts need Restock Notifications.
Tip: Read your order confirmation as a customer would. It's the email your buyers open most, and a clear, human one prevents a surprising number of "did my order go through?" messages.
Select rows in the list to enable, disable, or reset several templates at once — resetting removes your custom wording and puts the default copy back.
To see an email in a real inbox, open it and click Send test above the preview. It goes once to the address you type (your own by default) with sample details filled in — a sample order, a sample discount code — and your unsaved edits included. The address isn't added to your subscribers or customers, and nothing else is triggered, so you can test the welcome email without signing up to your own newsletter.
Custom emails for specific products
The Built-in tab holds the emails above. Under the Custom tab you write your own emails and pick the products they're for – a link to course materials, download instructions, a setup guide – and buyers of those products get them right after the order confirmation. See Send custom emails for specific products.
One version per language
If your store sells in more than one language (see Sell in multiple languages), each automatic email has a tab per language at the top of the editor. Every customer gets the version written in the language they shopped in: the language of the storefront they placed the order on, or of the form they subscribed through.
Emails exist in English, Polish, Spanish and German only, so those are the only tabs you can get. A customer who shops on another language version of your store, such as French or Italian, gets your emails in your store's default language.
A language you haven't written your own copy for isn't a problem — those customers receive the built-in template in their language, never your copy in a language they didn't choose. Resetting an email removes your copy in every language.
Shoppers with an account can also pick their language on their account's Profile page, which sets the language of their account pages and of the emails you send them.
FAQ
Why do my store's emails land in spam?
Usually because they're sent from a generic address rather than your domain. Setting up an email domain, with its DNS records verified, is the single biggest improvement you can make.
Can I stop a particular automatic email?
Yes. Open the email from the automation list and turn off Send this email — customers stop receiving that one and everything else carries on as before. To switch several off in one go, tick their rows in the list and choose Disable Selected. The newsletter confirmation is the exception: it's always sent, because without it nobody who signs up could ever confirm their address. Emails tied to a module also stop when you disable that module — and confirmations tied to orders and refunds are ones customers genuinely expect.
A customer got an email in the wrong language — why?
Emails follow the language the customer used: the language version of your store they ordered from, the form they subscribed through, or the language picked on their account's Profile page. Orders placed before languages were switched on, and orders you create yourself, fall back to your storefront's default language from Settings → Localization. The admin language you work in never affects what customers receive. Open the order in Orders to see which language it was placed in.
Can I use my own email marketing tool?
Yes — connect Klaviyo from Add-ons. Transactional emails about orders still come from your store.
Where do customer replies go?
To your outbound address, but only once your sending domain is verified — that's what proves you actually control it. Until then, replies fall back to your notification email instead, so a reply can never dead-end at an address you haven't verified.
What's next
- Point your domain at your store in Connect a custom domain.
- Email buyers of chosen products in Send custom emails for specific products.
- Write campaigns in Send newsletters & grow subscribers.
- Reply to customers from Handle customer messages.