Here’s how it usually goes. Years ago, someone set up the shop and put their own email address in the WooCommerce settings. Maybe it was the person who built the site, or a member of staff who has since moved on. Every WooCommerce new order email has gone to that inbox ever since, and for most of the year nobody notices, because someone is also keeping an eye on the orders screen.
Then December arrives. The person who checks the orders screen goes on holiday, or is off sick, or is out packing parcels all day. The inbox that gets the order emails has an out-of-office on it, or belongs to someone who left, or is a Gmail account nobody can log into any more. A customer orders a Christmas present, pays, and waits. Nobody at the shop knows the order exists until the customer emails to ask where it is, a few days too late.
WooCommerce didn’t lose the order. It’s sitting there in the admin. The notification just went to a mailbox nobody was reading.
It’s one of the easiest things to fix on a WooCommerce shop, and it takes about ten minutes. I’d do it before your Christmas orders start, not after.
Check who WooCommerce is actually telling
In wp-admin, go to WooCommerce > Settings > Emails. Depending on your version of WooCommerce the screen looks a little different, but you’ll see a list of every email the shop sends.
Most of them go to customers. Three of them go to you:
- New order, which is the one that tells you someone has bought something.
- Cancelled order.
- Failed order, which is worth having, because a failed payment is often a customer who’s about to try again or give up.
Open each one and look at two things:
- Is it enabled? I’ve seen New order switched off on a live shop, usually by someone who was getting too many emails during testing and never switched it back on.
- Who is it going to? The Recipient(s) box is the important one. If it’s empty, WooCommerce sends to the site’s administration email address, which is under Settings > General. Check that one too, because it’s often the oldest address on the whole site.
Read every address in that box and ask one question: if this email arrived on 20 December, would a person see it that day? If the answer is “probably” or “it goes to the old office address”, change it.
You can put more than one address in the box, separated by commas. That’s the simplest fix of all.
Send order emails to a role, not a person
The underlying problem is that order emails go to a person, and people go on holiday, change jobs and leave.
What I’d rather see is a role mailbox, something like [email protected], that more than one person can read. It might be a shared inbox, or an address that forwards to two people. Either way, when one of them is away, the other still sees the order.
A few things to check while you’re setting that up:
- Use an address on your own domain, not someone’s personal Gmail. If a member of staff leaves, the address stays with the business. If you’re not sure who controls your domain and its email, I wrote about why that matters in Why I Still Ask “Who Owns the DNS?”.
- Keep out-of-office replies off the orders mailbox. WooCommerce usually sets the reply-to on a new order email to the customer’s address. Depending on how the auto-reply works, a customer can end up with “I’m away until January” in reply to their Christmas order.
- Look at forwarding rules and filters. A rule that files anything from the website into a folder nobody opens does just as much damage as the wrong address.
- Check the mailbox isn’t full. A full mailbox quietly bounces mail.
If you’d like a second safety net, the WooCommerce mobile app can send a notification to your phone when a new order comes in. It doesn’t replace the email, but it means one more person hears about the order.
Then make sure the emails actually arrive
Getting the right address in the box is half the job. The other half is making sure the email arrives in that inbox and not in spam.
By default WordPress sends email straight from your web server, and a lot of mail providers don’t trust that. The order email gets marked as spam, delayed, or never arrives at all. The fix is to send through a proper mail service using SMTP. I’ve covered the setup in How to Fix WordPress Email Delivery Issues with the WP Mail SMTP Plugin.
While you’re there:
- Check the “From” address. At the bottom of the Emails settings there’s a From name and From address. It should be an address on your own domain, set up for sending, not a made-up one.
- Check your domain’s sending records, usually called SPF and DKIM. Your mail service will tell you which ones it needs. If those are missing, order emails are much more likely to end up in spam.
- Turn on an email log. A log tells you whether WooCommerce sent the email, which narrows the problem down straight away. If it was sent and didn’t arrive, it’s a delivery problem. If it was never sent, it’s a settings problem. There’s more on that in How to Log Emails Sent from WordPress.
Prove it with a real order
Settings only tell you what should happen. A real order tells you what does.
Place an order on the live shop the way a customer would, using a real payment method, then refund it. Then check:
- Did the New order email arrive in the orders mailbox?
- Did everyone who should get it actually see it, on their phone as well as their computer?
- Did it land in the inbox, or in spam or a filtered folder?
- Did the customer’s confirmation email arrive too?
If something doesn’t arrive, open the order in wp-admin. In the Order actions box there’s an option to resend the new order notification, which is handy for testing again after you’ve changed something, without placing another order.
My pre-Christmas order email check
If you only do one thing from this post, do this list before December:
- Open WooCommerce > Settings > Emails and check New order, Cancelled order and Failed order are enabled.
- Read every address in their Recipient(s) boxes, and the administration email address under Settings > General.
- Replace anyone who’s left, any old addresses and any personal accounts with a role mailbox on your own domain.
- Make sure at least two people can see that mailbox, and agree who’s watching it over the Christmas holidays.
- Take out-of-office replies and “file it away” rules off the orders mailbox.
- Check the From address, your SMTP setup and your email log.
- Place a real order, refund it, and confirm the emails arrived where you expected.
- Put a reminder in the calendar to check again before the holidays start, in case someone has changed something.
Wrap Up
An order email going to the wrong place doesn’t break anything you can see. The shop keeps taking money and the orders keep piling up in the admin. You only find out when a customer chases you, and at Christmas that’s usually too late to put right.
So check who WooCommerce is telling, send it to a role rather than a person, make sure it arrives, and prove it with a real order.
If you’d like a second pair of eyes on your shop’s order emails before the busy weeks start, book a quick call and we’ll go through it together.
Written by Connie, an AI, from Neil Matthews’ notes, archive, and direction. Neil directed and edited this piece. He did not write these words. Augmented publishing by Neil Matthews.