How To Set Up Pending Payment Email Notifications in WooCommerce?

WooCommerce has no pending payment email. There is no setting to switch on and no template to edit: none of the eleven core transactional emails fires on the Pending payment status, for the customer or for you. The fix is a free plugin that adds the missing trigger. Install ShopMagic, build one automation on the Order Pending event, and the reminder goes out by itself. Two things decide whether it actually recovers the order: the email has to carry a link that takes the customer straight back to payment, and it has to arrive before WooCommerce’s Hold stock setting cancels the order on its own. Both are covered below, along with the three order statuses people confuse at this point.

Does WooCommerce send a pending payment email notification?

No, and this is not a configuration you have missed.

Open WooCommerce → Settings → Emails and count what is there: New order, Cancelled order, Failed order, Order on hold, Processing order, Completed order, Refunded order, Customer invoice, New account, Reset password, New order note. Eleven emails, and not one of them is triggered by the Pending payment status. The customer who reaches your checkout, generates an order and then does not pay hears nothing at all. Neither do you.

That is a design decision rather than a bug, and it is not unreasonable on its own terms: an order sitting at Pending payment is often a few seconds old, on its way to a payment gateway, and emailing about it would be noise. The problem is that WooCommerce makes no distinction between an order that is thirty seconds from being paid and one that has been abandoned for an hour, so there is nothing to attach a reminder to.

What closes the gap is a plugin that adds the trigger WooCommerce does not have. ShopMagic is free, listens for the Order Pending event, and runs whatever action you attach to it, which for this purpose is an email. The build itself takes about five minutes and no code.

Before you build it, two details matter more than the email’s wording. The first is the payment link: a reminder that tells someone their order is unpaid but gives them no way back to the payment page converts badly, and WooCommerce has a dedicated pay-for-order URL for exactly this. The second is timing against Hold stock, which by default cancels unpaid orders after 60 minutes. Send a reminder on a two-hour delay and it arrives after WooCommerce has already cancelled the thing it is reminding people to pay for.

ShopMagic – a free email customizer for WordPress and WooCommerce

Table of contents

• Does WooCommerce send a pending payment email notification?
• Does WooCommerce pending payment occur often?
  • Pending payment vs On hold vs Failed
  • How long an order stays pending
• WooCommerce pending payment email notifications
• 3 steps to set up a WooCommerce pending payment email notification for free
  • Step 1: Install and activate the ShopMagic free plugin
  • Step 2: Create your first WooCommerce pending order email
  • Step 3: Customize the WooCommerce pending payment email notification
• The one element the email must contain
• When to send the reminder
• Summary
• Frequently asked questions

Does WooCommerce pending payment occur often?

Often enough that most stores have a queue of them sitting unnoticed in WooCommerce → Orders.

Pending payment is the status WooCommerce assigns the moment an order record is created but no payment has been confirmed. The customer filled in checkout, the order exists, the money did not arrive. Sometimes that is a gateway redirect the customer closed, sometimes a card that was never submitted, sometimes someone who got distracted mid-payment and meant to come back.

Pending payment vs On hold vs Failed

This is where setups go wrong, because people build an automation on the wrong event and then wonder why nothing sends. Three statuses describe an unpaid order and they are not interchangeable.

Pending payment means no payment attempt has succeeded and nothing is holding the order. This is the default landing status for gateway payments that were not completed.

On hold means you are waiting for a payment you expect to arrive by another route. Bank transfer (BACS) and cheque orders go straight here, not to Pending. Stock is reduced while the order waits. If your store runs on bank transfer, your unpaid orders are On hold and an Order Pending automation will never fire for them, which catches people out regularly. WooCommerce does send a customer email for this status out of the box.

Failed means a payment was attempted and the gateway refused it, or authentication did not complete. WooCommerce emails you about these, not the customer. A failed order often needs a different message from a pending one, because the customer may believe they have already paid.

How long an order stays pending

Not indefinitely, and the limit is probably shorter than you think.

In WooCommerce → Settings → Products → Inventory, with Manage stock enabled, the Hold stock (minutes) field controls how long an unpaid order holds its stock before WooCommerce cancels it automatically. The default is 60 minutes. After that the order flips to Cancelled, the stock goes back, and any reminder scheduled for later becomes a message about an order that no longer exists.

So the Hold stock value is not a detail in a settings screen. It is the deadline your reminder has to beat, and it is the number you check first when a reminder “did not work”.

From ShopMagic’s side the reason the order went pending does not matter. If the status is set, the automation runs.

WooCommerce pending payment email notifications

How to send WooCommerce pending payment emails

Three routes, in increasing order of effort:

1. A paid plugin that adds order-status emails
2. A custom action hook, if you are comfortable in PHP
3. ShopMagic, free, with no code

The third is what this guide uses, because the trigger is the only missing piece and the free version has it.

🪄 See what ShopMagic looks like from the inside:

Why a pending reminder is worth building

Because the customer at this point has already chosen the product, filled in their details and reached the payment step. They are the warmest audience your store has. An abandoned cart email is addressed to someone who was browsing; a pending payment reminder is addressed to someone who was thirty seconds from buying.

That also sets the tone. This is a transactional message about an order that exists, not a marketing email, and it should read that way.

3 steps to set up a WooCommerce pending payment email notification

1. Install the free ShopMagic plugin
2. Create an automation on the Order Pending event
3. Write the email, including the payment link

Step 1: Install and activate the ShopMagic free plugin

In your WordPress dashboard go to Plugins → Add New and search for ShopMagic, or download the zip directly from the WordPress.org repository.

Step 2: Create your first WooCommerce pending order email

Find ShopMagic in the dashboard and click Add New.

The title is for you alone, so name it after what it does. As the event, select Order Pending.

Tick the rechecking order status option. On this automation it is not optional in any practical sense: it verifies the order is still pending at the moment the email is about to go, which is precisely the case where the customer paid in the meantime. Without it you email people to chase money they have already sent.

Leaving Filter empty makes the automation global, firing for every pending order. That is the right starting point; narrow it later if you find you need to.

Step 3: Customize the WooCommerce pending payment email notification

✅ Choose the type of action: Send Email, Plain Text, Raw HTML, add or remove from a list, or a Mailchimp or Slack integration.

✅ The Description names the action for your own reference. You can send a test email from here to any address.

🔥 Then the message itself:

✅ To is the recipient, prefilled with {{ customer.email }}. For a guest order this resolves to the address entered at checkout, so guest orders are covered without anything extra.

✅ Subject and Heading work as in standard WooCommerce emails and both accept placeholders.

✅ Template: the WooCommerce template, or none.

✅ Message. Placeholders work here too and the full list sits in the right-hand panel.

✅ At the bottom there is an option to add an unsubscribe link. Leave it off for this automation. A payment reminder is transactional, not marketing, and offering an unsubscribe on it invites customers to opt out of messages about their own orders.

Use Send test before activating, and check how it looks in a real inbox rather than a preview.

The one element the email must contain

A link straight back to payment. Everything else in the message is secondary.

WooCommerce has a built-in pay-for-order page for exactly this situation. It loads the existing order, keeps the items and totals, and takes the customer to the gateway without their having to rebuild the basket or find anything. The URL follows this shape:

/checkout/order-pay/{order_id}/?pay_for_order=true&key={order_key}

The order key is what makes it work for guests. It authenticates the link on its own, so a customer with no account can pay from the email without logging in or creating one, which is most customers in most stores.

In ShopMagic you insert this with the order payment URL placeholder rather than building the URL by hand. Open the placeholder list in the right-hand panel of the action and pick the one for the order’s payment link.

Treat that link as the whole point of the email. Put it in a visible button near the top, repeat it as a plain text link at the bottom for clients that strip styling, and keep the rest of the message short: what was ordered, what it costs, how to pay. A reminder without the link asks the customer to go and find their order themselves, and most will not.

When to send the reminder

Against the Hold stock deadline, not against general email-marketing advice.

If Hold stock is at its 60-minute default, a reminder has to land inside that window or the order is cancelled before anyone reads it. Something in the range of 15 to 30 minutes gives the customer time to finish a payment they were already completing, without arriving so late that it is pointless.

If you have cleared Hold stock and unpaid orders persist, you have more room, and a second reminder a day later becomes worth testing. But check the setting first. The commonest reason a pending reminder appears not to work is that it was scheduled past the point where WooCommerce cancels the order.

One more check before you trust the automation: look at ShopMagic’s logs. They distinguish an email that was never generated from one that was generated and failed to send, which are different problems with different fixes.

Summary

WooCommerce ships eleven transactional emails and none of them covers Pending payment, so an order that reaches checkout and is never paid for generates no message to the customer and no alert to you. There is no setting to change, because the trigger does not exist. A free plugin adds it: in ShopMagic, one automation on the Order Pending event, with rechecking order status enabled so that customers who pay in the meantime are not chased.

Before building it, confirm which status your unpaid orders actually land in. Gateway payments that were not completed go to Pending payment; bank transfer and cheque orders go to On hold and send their own WooCommerce email; refused payments go to Failed and notify only you. An Order Pending automation covers the first group and nothing else, which is why bank-transfer stores often find their reminder never fires.

Two things determine whether the reminder recovers the sale. The email must contain WooCommerce’s pay-for-order link, which carries the order key and therefore works for guests without an account, and nothing else in the message matters nearly as much. And it must arrive before Hold stock cancels the order, which happens after 60 minutes by default. A reminder scheduled for two hours later is a message about an order WooCommerce has already cancelled, which is the single commonest reason this setup appears not to work.

Build the automation, send yourself a test, place a real pending order and watch the logs once. Fifteen minutes of checking saves finding out from a customer.

Frequently asked questions

Does WooCommerce send a pending payment email?

No. None of the eleven core transactional emails is triggered by the Pending payment status, to the customer or to the admin. The status has no template, so there is nothing to enable or edit.

What is the difference between Pending payment, On hold and Failed?

Pending payment means no payment succeeded and nothing is holding the order, which is where incomplete gateway payments land. On hold means you are waiting for payment by another route, such as bank transfer or cheque, and WooCommerce does email the customer about it. Failed means a payment was attempted and refused, and WooCommerce notifies only the admin.

How long does an order stay pending in WooCommerce?

By default 60 minutes, set by Hold stock (minutes) in WooCommerce → Settings → Products → Inventory, after which WooCommerce cancels the order and returns the stock. Clearing the field disables automatic cancellation.

What should a pending payment reminder contain?

A link to WooCommerce’s pay-for-order page above everything else, plus what was ordered and the total. Keep it short and transactional.

Can a guest pay from the reminder email?

Yes. The pay-for-order URL includes the order key, which authenticates the link, so a customer with no account can complete payment without logging in or registering.

When should the reminder be sent?

Inside the Hold stock window, so roughly 15 to 30 minutes on default settings. Anything later arrives after WooCommerce has cancelled the order.

Should the reminder have an unsubscribe link?

No. It is a transactional message about an order the customer placed, and an unsubscribe link on it risks them opting out of order notifications.

Is a delay needed, and is it free?

A delay is what makes this a reminder rather than an instant notification, and it is part of ShopMagic PRO. The automation itself, the Order Pending event and the email action are all in the free version.

Why is my pending reminder not sending?

Check in this order: whether your unpaid orders are actually Pending rather than On hold, whether the delay exceeds Hold stock, and whether ShopMagic’s logs show the email as never generated or as generated and failed. Those point to three different causes.