How to Easily Send WooCommerce Cancelled Order Email to Your Customers

Did you recently notice your customers don’t get any kind of email from WooCommerce when their order is cancelled?

(imagine how surprised they must have been)

Or were you wondering what is the best way to let them know their order was dropped and how to set it up?

Well, I have bad, good, and even better news for you.

🤬 Bad: WooCommerce is outstanding, but holy smokes it sometimes sucks in terms of email. Actually, there is no out-of-the-box option to send cancelled (or failed) order emails from your admin panel. But…

👍 Good: You can easily add this option by yourself with a little code or a free plugin like ShopMagic.

✅ Better: In this guide you will find an exact step-by-step guide on how to do this (including a ready-to-use template).

The truth is, you probably want to send as few emails like that as possible, right?

After all, it’s a failed transaction you could probably prevent. It can have a negative impact on your future sales if a customer turns out dissatisfied.

But, if you play this right, your customers will be thankful for timely communication and buying from you again in no-time.

In this article, I’ll show you everything you need to know about setting up cancellation emails in WooCommerce and how to use them to your advantage.

What is an order cancellation email in WooCommerce?

An order cancellation email is sent from your WooCommerce store when one of your orders’ status changes to “Cancelled”.

This can be triggered by three scenarios:

1. You cancel an order in WooCommerce admin panel,
2. Customer cancels an order or contacts you with a cancellation request,
3. Order is pending for too long, and its status is automatically set to “cancelled”

Another definition from the official WooCommerce documentation (as seen above) says that an order cancellation email is a transactional email that is sent to the store admin only.

That confirms there is no direct option to send such emails in Woo, but don’t worry – fixing cancelled order emails for your customers is easy with ShopMagic.

If you’d like to verify your current cancelled order email settings first, do the following:

Go to your admin dashboard, WooCommerce → Settings → Email tab. You will notice that the “Cancelled order” emails’ recipient is probably set to your store’s admin email address.

You can edit the email settings after clicking the “Manage” button.

You will have an option to set a single email address as a recipient (or add more separated by commas), but it’s impossible to send it to the customer who made an order.

As you can see, if you’re relying solely on standard WooCommerce emails your customers will never get notified that their order got cancelled.

WooCommerce is a great eCommerce platform, no doubt about that. But is it great in terms of emails? Not so much, and that means a bad experience for your customers.

Luckily, ShopMagic plugin makes the whole process a lot easier.

How to send a WooCommerce cancelled order email to customer

Method #1 – Send email manually from your inbox

Managing only a few cancelled orders per month or would like to send personal, fingers-written emails to your customers? Then sending cancelled order emails manually still may be a viable method.

But let’s be honest – it’s not 1950s anymore, we don’t need to smack a stamp on an envelope and send our mail one by one.

Here is what you would have to do to make it work:

1. Develop a process to track which cancelled and failed orders you followed up on
2. Find a specific order that was cancelled
3. Copy customer contact details
4. Go over to your email inbox
5. Fill email content with all applicable information (may require a lot of copy-pasting and formatting)
6. Email your customer
7. Repeat for every cancelled order

It’s a lot of wasted time and unnecessary tasks you can automate with a plugin like ShopMagic – for free.

Let’s move on to the next method.

Method #2 – Add custom code to functions.php file

One of the reasons why WordPress is so popular is because of its customizability, and it’s no different when it comes to everything related to email.

Even with limited knowledge about HTML, CSS, and PHP you can probably find more than enough information online to bake your own rough solution for sending cancelled order emails to your customers.

All you have to do is to add a PHP code snippet to your functions.php file. Its job would be to override current WooCommerce settings and add customers’ email as a recipient.

Here are some existing threads that contain useful advice on the topic:

• https://wordpress.org/support/topic/wc-email-to-customer-on-cancelled-order/
• https://stackoverflow.com/questions/47648386/sending-email-to-customer-on-cancelled-order-in-woocommerce
• https://stackoverflow.com/questions/51635878/send-cancelled-and-failed-order-email-to-customer-in-woocommerce-3

Keep in mind this solution is far from perfect. The code provided may be outdated by now. It also requires maintenance, and if anything goes wrong you probably will need help from a professional developer.

This brings us to the last (and objectively best) method.

Method #3 – Use a plugin (recommended by WooCommerce)

As confirmed in this official WooCommerce support thread, a plugin is the right solution for sending your cancelled order emails.

“…cancelled orders are only sent to the Admin, so you’ll need to use a plugin to take care of sending these notifications to the customer…”

– WooCommerce Support

With an easy-to-use, secure and constantly developed plugin like ShopMagic it only takes a couple of minutes to set up.

Here are the exact steps to start sending WooCommerce cancelled order emails to your customers:

Step 1: Install and activate ShopMagic

The fastest way to do this will be to go to your WooCommerce admin panel → Plugins → Add new, and search for ShopMagic.

You can also download the ShopMagic .zip file from the WordPress plugins directory or by clicking the “Download for free” button below.

Step 2: Add an automation to send WooCommerce cancel order email to your customers

Once you have ShopMagic installed and activated, let’s create your first automation. Choose: ShopMagic → Add New in your WordPress menu.

Step 3: Add action to send email after status is changed to “Order cancelled”

Let’s name the automation “Order cancellation email” and then choose the event “Order Cancelled”. This will trigger an action (which we will configure in the next step) when the order gets cancelled.

First, choose your action: “Send Email”. You can optionally enter a description to help you distinguish actions if you add more. Descriptions are for your reference only.

Next, configure the action elements. The most important are the “To”, “Subject” and “Message” fields. They all support placeholders.

For example, when you enter the {{ customer.email }} placeholder in the “To” field, it will be automatically sent to the customer’s email that was actually used in the order.

When creating a cancelled order email automation, you can also choose a template (use the default WooCommerce one or create your own from scratch) and enter a heading for your message.

Order cancellation email template

The most important part is the message itself.

As you probably know, WooCommerce does not allow you to change email texts. Now with ShopMagic you can create a completely custom message, also using placeholders.

If you need to speed things up, below you can find a basic example that you can copy and customize to your needs:

Hi {{ customer.first_name }},

We are sorry, but you ShopMagic order has been cancelled.

The order details are as follows:
{{ order.details }}

Please let us know if we can help!

Cheers,
ShopMagic Team

When the email is sent it will look like this:

Are you ready to send WooCommerce cancelled order emails to your customers?

To wrap things up, WooCommerce cancelled order emails to customers are not possible with the out-of-the box setup. But as with most things in WordPress, you can easily fix it with a plugin – ShopMagic.

In this quick guide, you have learned how to quickly set up a custom WooCommerce email after your customer cancels an order.

If you have any questions about using ShopMagic – don’t hesitate to let us know!

Featured Image by Freepik