How to Test and Preview Emails for WooCommerce?

As a WooCommerce online store owner, you can test and preview emails for WooCommerce that are sent to customers to ensure they receive the emails. 

These are transactional emails, and your customers should receive them in their inboxes. Sometimes, customers don’t receive the emails, or they go into the spam folders, which can cause issues for you. 

Research has shown that over 4 billion people worldwide use emails, so ensuring that your customers are getting transactional and marketing emails can yield an excellent boost in sales. 

Sometimes you may have also customized the WooCommerce email templates, so you may want to preview the WooCommerce emails to ensure how they’ll look to customers. 

So, In today’s tutorial, I’ll share the process of testing and previewing emails for WooCommerce in three different ways. Without any further ado, let’s jump into the tutorial. 

Why Preview Emails for WooCommerce?

Email is one of the top communication methods eCommerce stores use to interact with customers. For instance, order confirmation emails, emails about new products, emails to reset passwords, etc.

One of the most important things about emails is that they are clear. So, when you send emails, you want to ensure that the user can see everything clearly, from order details to billing and shipping information. That’s why it’s crucial to test your WooCommerce emails and preview them.

This will let you check the content of your emails and look at them before you send them to your customers. The problem is that WooCommerce doesn’t give you a way to test your emails by default. 

How to Test and Preview WooCommerce Emails?

There are three methods to test and preview the WooCommerce emails, and I’ll show you each. 

Please follow the following steps to preview emails for WooCommerce. 

1. Creating a Custom Order on Your WooCommerce Store

The first way to test and preview the WooCommerce emails is by creating a custom order on your store. There are two different approaches to creating a custom order. 

• Ordering a product like regular customers.
• Creating orders from the WordPress dashboard. 

Both these methods do a similar job, depending on how you want to do it. I’ll explain both ways in detail. Let’s jump into it. 

1.1. Ordering a Product Like Regular Customers

To preview your WooCommerce emails, you can order a product like your regular customers. You may think you’ll have to buy a product from your store, but that’s not the case. 

You can test and preview the WooCommerce emails by adding the COD payment method or using random details if you don’t know how to add a payment method to your store. 

You can simply navigate to WooCommerce » Settings » Payments from your WordPress dashboard and enable/disable any default payment methods. 

However, if you want to add a custom payment method, the best payment method list will help you to find one.

Just ensure that you use the email on which you want to receive the WooCommerce emails to preview them. 

For example: On my demo site, I ordered a product using the COD payment method but used my correct email so that I could preview the emails. 

Note: I am using a custom WooCommerce checkout created by AIO Checkout. Follow a few recommended tutorials if you want to edit or create a similar checkout. 

• How To Create a WooCommerce Checkout like Shopify?
• How to Create a WooCommerce 2-step Checkout
• How to Combine WooCommerce Cart and Checkout Page?
• How to Edit the WooCommerce Checkout Page

Once I placed the order, I received an email in my inbox from my store confirming the purchase and order details. 

Now I have tested the email so that the customers will get the email. Also, I can preview the email, and if I want, I can customize the template. 

1.2. Creating Orders From WordPress Dashboard

The second way to create custom WooCommerce orders is from the WordPress dashboard. You need to navigate to WooCommerce » Orders from your WordPress dashboard and click the ‘Add Order’ button at the top left corner of your screen. 

After that, you’ll be redirected to the order page, where you can fill up the details, add items and place the order. 

Note: All this will be done from within the dashboard, and you won’t be redirected to the shop, cart, or checkout page. You can do everything from a single page. 

Once you have created the order, you can check your email to preview the WooCommerce emails. 

2. Edit an Existing Order   

The second method to review the WooCommerce emails is by editing an existing order. You can edit the email of an existing order to test and preview if the customers are getting the emails. 

To edit an existing order, you need to navigate to WooCommerce » Orders from your WordPress dashboard.

To edit any order, you just need to click the order, and you’ll be redirected to the edit order page, where you can edit the billing details and add your email address where you want to receive the WooCommerce emails. 

Click the pencil icon to edit the billing details. 

This way, you’ll be able to check if the customers are receiving the transactional emails or if they are going into the spam folders. Moreover, you can also preview the email template.                                 

3. Preview Emails Using a Plugin

The third method to preview emails is using the Preview E-mails for WooCommerce plugin. It is a free plugin; you can download it easily from your WordPress dashboard or the WordPress.org site. 

Once you have installed and activated the plugin, it will create a new child tab under the WooCommerce tab.

Navigate to WooCommerce » Preview Emails from your WordPress admin dashboard. 

Now you can choose the email you want to test and preview, select the order, and if you cannot find the order you wish to test, you can search for the order in the Seach Orders field. 

After that, you need to enter your email in the Mail to field to receive an email so you can preview it. It is optional because you can still preview the email within your dashboard. 

But if you want to receive an email to cross-check everything, you can enter your email to receive the test email. 

Don’t forget to click the Submit button. 

After that, you’ll be redirected to the page where you can preview the email. You’ll also receive an email in your inbox. 

Conclusion

That’s it for today’s tutorial. 

I hope this tutorial was helpful to you and that you were able to preview emails for WooCommerce. There’s a lot you can do to optimize your WooCommerce store. For example, you can send automatic invoices to customers or add purchase items to the WooComemrce email subjects and more. 

Besides the emails, you can improve your WooCommerce checkout by using the AIO Checkout plugin. It is one of the best and all-in-one solutions to all your checkout issues. 
Using this plugin, you can improve your customer experience and increase sales.