We are sending out gifts to our big buyers/best customers and they seem to be receiving the “Your Order Has Shipped” confirmation email. We had to place orders in their account as “promo” so, of course, they were zero dollars, but they see the original price overridden on the receipt.
Is there a way to turn this feature off for a select group of orders?
Or is the only workaround adding a dummy email to the comp order when it is placed?
If I were doing this I would probably create a custom order confirmation to inform them of this gift and tell them whatever you want to tell them about it, and then leave the shipping confirmation as is. At least that way you are building some anticipation and they can reschedule the delivery with you if they need to.
Surprises are always nice, but I don’t really like sending things to people (that require being present & a signature) who I don’t know will be there.
The gifts are books, stemware, etc. They will not require a signature. We honestly didn’t want them to receive notification of the parcels at all. We have had a wonderful success rate with sending out these gifts in the past.
Is there anyway for Vin65 to not send the auto generated emails?
If only there was some sort of box to uncheck that sends the auto-confirmation emails from Vin65.
We would rather not create another auto email for these skus.
In the years I have been here they have steadfastly refused to optionally turn off auto emails.
I would probably do it as a special club - put everyone you want in it and create a package. Then you can specify the email that goes out at order time, or not have one at all - but then you still will see the overridden list prices in the shipping auto emails. But at least you can avoid the initial order email.
If doing a bundle is unacceptable, I can only suggest making special SKUs just for the gift items that are $0.
I’ve had the same experience as well with refusal to turn off auto emails.
I know this isn’t ideal, but what about processing them as pick up orders from the start - that’d be the only way I see to avoid tracking emails going out.
I don’t know if you use a fulfillment house or ship in house, but this would be a time to go old school - manual uploads to the fulfillment center portal for them to ship, or give your shipping coordinator a master spreadsheet/manifest to work off of. Not sure how many people we’re talking about, but if it’s a small amount, it would be possible.
Again, not ideal, but if you need to get around tracking emails entirely, that’d be the way.
Alternatively, editing your tracking email down to remove the full order “blob” just for the day the emails go out and say something like, “We have a surprise for you, one of our best customers, and it’s headed your way! No signature needed.” or something like that. I know it kills the surprise, but at least the order info wouldn’t be populating. And you may get even faster appreciation from these people - but the flip side would be, it’s a somewhat pointless email.
Basically, for things like this, I try to work with the software, not against it. It’s come from years of pulling my hair out when I try to fight it. Hope this helps!
Also Jeff’s idea to use a club is great! You can select if you want to use an email or not for shipping members. I just think they will still get tracking numbers once these ship?
If I only got a tracking notification unexpectedly from a winery I had a club membership with, I can imagine I’d react by checking my bank statements to figure out what the heck they had billed me for, or I’d call the winery to find out what the mistake was.
Had I received an email saying “Expect a surprise gift” I would instead spend the next few days with excited anticipation. I really don’t think it kills the surprise at all, especially if you do as @ElJefe said and create a bundle that doesn’t show them what the items really are when they go digging.
You could do that, but again, how many accounts are we talking about here? Could be a lot of work, plus ensuring it’s changed back so they get their emails in the future. I’d really suggest you look into just removing the //OrderBlob// in tracking just for this and then adding it back. If you look in Documentation there’s an explanation of what all the auto populated fields do and how to add them/remove them so they’re working right.
Also re: compliance, I get it, our compliance team wants to know even if there’s no charge to the customer, no taxes to file, no booze even going into the state. You could send your pick up orders through to ShipCompliant (it’s in settings in Vin65) and manually edit to change to shipping orders after these have gone out. You can do it in just a few clicks with the filters in ShipCompliant under orders. Assuming you use ShipCompliant here
If you are going to change email bodies while processing these, just make sure a regular order can’t squeak through.
I never have gift card sales in the summer. I use gift cards for a 4 hour club event in August to sell futures, and change the gift card email to talk about the futures they bought. So of course, this year during that 4 hour window someone bought a whole bunch of gift cards for friends…
Okay - we are doing our Anniversary program again and after over thinking this issue time and time again - I think I have a work around.
FUTURE SHIP DATE!
WD will not pull tracking from ShipCompliant until the date that is on the order. We will manually mark the order as shipped in WD and Voila! No tracking emails are sent to the Club member.
Hope this helps!