Order confirmation: the most-read message you will ever send

An order confirmation is read by almost everybody who receives one, which makes it the highest-attention message a business sends and the one most often left as a default template. It has three jobs at once: reassuring somebody who has just parted with money, recording what was agreed, and answering the questions that otherwise arrive as support calls over the following week.

What an order confirmation must contain

• What was ordered, in plain terms, with quantities and the price actually paid including tax and delivery.
• An order reference, prominently, since that is what every subsequent conversation will start with.
• When it will arrive, or when they will next hear from you if that is not known yet.
• Where it is going, so an address error is caught while it can still be fixed.
• How to change or cancel, with the deadline, rather than leaving somebody to find it.
• How to reach a human, which is the detail most often omitted and most often wanted.

What it legally represents

More than people assume. In many jurisdictions the confirmation is evidence of the contract terms, and sending one that differs from what the customer saw at checkout creates a problem rather than solving it. Pricing errors are the practical case: whether an incorrectly priced order can be cancelled depends partly on what your terms say and partly on what the confirmation said, so the message should confirm the order rather than purport to accept it where your terms specify acceptance happens at dispatch. That distinction is worth getting right once, in writing, rather than discovering during a dispute.

Send it immediately or not at all — a confirmation arriving twenty minutes later generates exactly the support contact it was supposed to prevent. If something in your process makes instant impossible, say on the checkout page when it will arrive, which converts anxiety into expectation.

The support calls it prevents

1. Delivery timing, which is the single commonest question and is answerable in one line.
2. Whether the payment went through, answered simply by the message existing.
3. What was actually ordered, where somebody bought several variants and cannot remember which.
4. How to change the address, which is cheap before dispatch and expensive afterwards.
5. Whether a discount applied, visible if you show the breakdown rather than only the total.
6. What happens next, which prevents the message sent three days later asking whether anything is happening.

What not to put in it

Marketing, mostly. The temptation is obvious — this is the message everybody opens — but an order confirmation cluttered with recommendations buries the reference number somebody is looking for, and in several jurisdictions adding promotional content to a transactional message changes which rules apply to it. A single quiet line at the bottom is the limit worth taking, and even that should not push the practical information below the fold.

Ettex Email sends the confirmation from the order itself, so the details match what was bought rather than being typed again, and the reference in the message is the one in your records. Where the hesitation happened before the order rather than after it, the recovery sequence is a different message with a different purpose.