How to Set Up WooCommerce Emails for Beginners

Checked for accuracy and updated on August 13, 2026.

Most WooCommerce stores run for weeks on default email settings before anyone notices a problem — until a customer says they never got an order confirmation, or a support ticket mentions your emails landed in spam. By then you’ve likely lost sales you never even knew were slipping away. The defaults technically work, right up until deliverability quietly breaks, which is exactly why this step gets skipped more than any other part of a new store build.

Enable the Notifications That Matter

In WooCommerce → Settings → Emails, you’ll find New Order, Cancelled Order, Failed Order, Processing Order, Completed Order, Refunded Order, Customer Invoice, and a handful of account-related emails — the official documentation lists exactly what triggers each one. Not every store needs all of them switched on for both admin and customer; turning everything on by default just buries the emails that actually matter in noise. At minimum, keep New Order enabled for yourself, and Processing plus Completed enabled for customers so they always know where a purchase stands.

Under Email sender options, set a “From” name customers will recognise — the store name, not “WordPress” or “admin” — and an address on your own domain (orders@yourstore.com) rather than free webmail. A generic-looking sender is one of the fastest ways to get marked as spam by someone who doesn’t recognise it. If you don’t have a branded inbox yet, a professional email address takes a few minutes to set up.

The New Block-Based Email Editor (Beta, 2026)

WooCommerce has been building a native block-based editor for these transactional emails, currently available as a beta feature under WooCommerce → Settings → Advanced → Features. Once enabled, individual emails — order confirmations, completed orders, refunds — open in the same block editor used for posts and pages: you edit headers, text sections, images, and footers visually rather than through the older static “upload a logo, pick two colours” template settings. It’s a genuine step up in control, though as of this beta the order and billing details table itself is still auto-generated and not directly block-editable — the surrounding content is what you’re actually customising. As of WooCommerce 11.0 (released 28 July 2026), it also picked up Vimeo, TikTok, and Dailymotion video embeds — a linked video now renders as a clickable thumbnail with a play button inside the email itself, rather than a plain text link.

Being beta, it’s worth trying on a staging copy first rather than a live store, but it’s the direction WooCommerce email customisation is clearly heading — worth knowing about even if you stick with the classic template settings for now.

The One Fix That Actually Matters: Authenticated SMTP

WooCommerce emails aren’t just receipts — they’re the main channel customers use to track an order, request a refund, or decide whether they trust the store enough to buy again. By default, WordPress sends mail through PHP’s mail() function, which most inbox providers treat with suspicion because it isn’t authenticated — which is often why emails end up in spam even though the store technically “sent” them successfully. Nothing else on this page — branding, sender name, the new block editor — matters if the email never reaches the inbox in the first place.

The fix is routing WooCommerce mail through a proper authenticated SMTP service instead — same setup process as any WordPress site, covered in how to set up SMTP in WordPress. Once it’s connected, send a test email from WooCommerce’s email settings page before trusting it with live orders — then place a real test order and walk it through every status (processing, completed, refunded, cancelled), checking each one actually triggers the email you expect and renders correctly on mobile. It’s common to test only the order confirmation and never notice the refund email template still looks unstyled months later.

If You Need More Than the Settings Screen Allows

For content the visual editor and beta block editor still can’t reach — inserting a dynamic discount code, adding conditional content based on what was ordered — WooCommerce’s email hooks are the developer-level option: woocommerce_email_header and woocommerce_email_footer wrap every email and are the standard place to inject custom HTML via a small function added through Code Snippets, without touching WooCommerce’s own template files (which get overwritten on every update). This is a step beyond what most stores need, but worth knowing exists before reaching for a paid email-customizer plugin for something a ten-line snippet handles.

WooCommerce’s built-in settings plus SMTP cover most small-to-mid stores’ needs entirely. Genuine automation — abandoned cart sequences, customer segmentation, multi-step follow-ups — is a job for a dedicated email marketing extension, since core WooCommerce emails are built for transactional messages, not campaigns; keep marketing content out of them entirely, since customers expect an order confirmation to be about their order. If the store sells recurring products, renewal and failed-payment emails matter even more than standard order notifications — see setting up WooCommerce Subscriptions for how those fit into a billing cycle. For the full setup sequence from store creation onward, the step-by-step guide to building a WordPress website covers where email configuration fits alongside the rest.