How To Set Up Pending Payment Email Notifications in WooCommerce

In this tutorial, we will create automated pending payment email notifications for WooCommerce, which will trigger for orders with a pending status. More importantly, we will set up a pending payment reminder with a free plugin that lets you send transactional emails on every possible WooCommerce order status.

WooCommerce pending payments are very common

If you are running an e-commerce business built with WooCommerce, there’s a good chance that one or more orders in your store had Order Pending status.

Order pending may occur in many situations in WooCommerce for your customers’ orders. Generally, it happens when the customer placed an order but did pay for it. However, from ShopMagic’s perspective, the reason does not matter. If the specified order status will be given, the automation will run.

You may ask yourself why is it so important to write an article about it? WooCommerce emails support pending orders. Well, I will disappoint you. You can not create WooCommerce pending emails in standard WooCommerce installation.

Wait a sec, no WooCommerce pending emails, notifications, or reminders in WooCommerce?

That’s right. It’s the way how it was designed. No pending payment reminders are available out-of-the-box. We will not discuss the meaningfulness behind this decision because most likely it won’t change anything. However, we will discuss the possible solutions for creating actual pending payment notifications as WooCommerce automated emails. There are a few ways of solving this and creating WooCommerce pending payment emails to notify customers when their orders are pending:

• You can buy a $49 or $99 plugin
• If you are familiar with the code, you can use a custom action hook
• You can install ShopMagic for free and resolve it in 5 minutes 🙂

Number 3 is my choice. What to do now?

“Wise decision you have made young padawan” 😉 More seriously – I’ll use ShopMagic to resolve this issue because not only it’s a free email notification plugin. You also do not need to put a single line of code.

However, with ShopMagic installation may be a turning point for your store. Let’s not forget that ShopMagic is a powerful marketing automation plugin. Literally, every WooCommerce business can benefit from sending new customer pending order reminders. How, you might ask?

1. It will trigger automatically and increase the conversion rate in your store
2. Customers loyalty will rise, and they will return to your store more often
3. Ultimately, you will be earning more money

Did I mention that with ShopMagic you can implement customer segmentation into your store? The list of potential benefits is long so why don’t you try it? ShopMagic is free to download.

3 steps to set up a pending payment email notification

Did you already look for possible solutions and got overwhelmed with technical advice? Or you simply don’t like the idea of spending hours poking around in code?

Actually, the whole process is really simple. To send automated pending payment reminders follow these 3 steps:

1. Download and install an email customizer plugin like ShopMagic
2. Create a new automation (you can find a detailed, step-by-step guide below)
3. Customize your email reminder with placeholder and an easy-to-use editor

How to install and activate ShopMagic?

Before we will move to the creation of email notifications for pending payments, you need to download, install and activate ShopMagic. If you are in your WordPress dashboard, simply click on Plugins → Add New and find ShopMagic in the plugins’ repository. You can also download the zip file directly from the WordPress.org website.

shopmagic.app

How to create an automation for WooCommerce pending emails?

Find ShopMagic in your dashboard and click on Add New. You will see a new window, where we will create our new automation for emails that will trigger for pending orders in your WooCommerce store.

Starting from the top of the screen, you will see the Add title field and Event metabox where you can select a specified event. The title is just a title, so you can write whatever you want here, in my example it is “WooCommerce pending emails automation” because I like when the title is connected to the content of the automation.

As an event, which is quite obvious, I selected Order Pending. In most cases, it’s a good idea to select the rechecking order status checkbox. It will prevent sending an email if the order status changes in the meantime.

Creating an email action that triggers on WooCommerce pending order status

In our example, we are not assigning Filter. It will cause that whole automation will be global and trigger for all of the orders with Order Pending status.

Take a look at my screen, in which you can see the setting for the action (you can use placeholders too):

shopmagic.app

Customize your pending payment reminders

First is the type of action (Send Email/Plain Text/Raw HTML/MailChimp and Slack integrations). After that, there’s a Description where you can name your action. Similar to the title it’s up to you what you will write here.

The Delay field is to delay an email for a fixed amount of minutes/hours/days or weeks but it’s a part of ShopMagic PRO.

To is for the recipient. It’s prefilled with the placeholder { customer.email } but you can delete it and write a different email here.

Subject and Heading can also be customized and perform the same role as in the standard emails.

Template. Choose from WooCommerce Template or none.

Message field. Here you can write your message for the WooCommerce pending emails. The message field (same as Subject and Heading) supports placeholders. You can find a full list of available placeholders on the right side of the screen.

At the bottom of the page, there’s an option to add an unsubscribe link to the automation.

Done. Your WooCommerce pending email notification is ready

This time I won’t be showing you the result. If you followed this guide then you have to simply do one thing – use the Send test feature. Starting from the ShopMagic 2.11 there’s no need to fire the whole automation if you want to check it. Click on Send test and then confirm the email.

I hope that this tutorial will help you when your store encounters orders with pending status. As always, if you have further questions, I’m here to help.