Order confirmation emails: what to get right first

The gap between knowing this and actually doing it is where most teams lose ground. If you only fix one thing about order confirmation emails this quarter, make it the first item below.

In e-commerce every friction point has a price attached, and the arithmetic is unusually easy to check. It is worth deciding this deliberately rather than inheriting whatever the last person set up.

Start here

It is the most-opened email you will ever send. Small and consistent beats large and occasional here. It rarely shows up as a line item, which is exactly why it slips.

Then this

Include everything needed to avoid a support ticket. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.

Eventually

A tracking link reduces "where is my order" enquiries. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. If it only works because one person remembers to do something, it does not work yet.

The short version

Trust does most of the selling online, and trust is built from unglamorous details. Three things worth confirming about order confirmation emails before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Include everything needed to avoid a support ticket — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

Pick the one that would hurt most if it failed, and start there.