Email notifications

The Emails screen controls every automatic email your site sends - order confirmations, booking alerts, reminders, and the account sign-in emails for customer accounts. Three things are configured here: the shared look of your emails, the wording of each notification, and the automated promo codes that can travel inside them. The domain they're sent from is now configured in Settings → Domain.

This is the second of the three things to settle before your first sale. Without it a customer pays and hears nothing back - the order ends in silence.

Email design

This is where you set the shared look of every email - define it once and every notification inherits it:

• Brand & sender - sender ("From") name, reply-to email, logo, accent colour, sign-off, and footer note. When you add a logo, a Show business name toggle appears: turn it off to show only the logo at the top of the email, without the name text. The "From" sender always keeps the business name, so an email is never sender-less. The logo preview sits on your actual header colour, so a logo that would disappear in the email (a dark logo on a dark accent) looks just as faint here - pick a logo that contrasts your header colour, and a warning appears if a freshly uploaded one won't show. Uploading a logo without a transparent background (e.g. a JPEG) also shows a warning - it would appear as a solid rectangle on the header. Below the picker there is a mini preview on a light and on a dark background too: some mail apps (e.g. Gmail) flip an email's colours in dark mode without touching images, so pick a logo that stays readable on both.
• Visual style - page and card backgrounds, text and heading colours, font, button style and colour, corner rounding, and the header style (colour band, banner image, or logo only). By default the page background matches the card, so the email fills the full width with no grey frame down the sides; if you set a different page background, the content shows as a centred card floating on it.

A live preview on the right updates the moment you change anything, and a single Save design button stores it all.

On old desktop Outlook, buttons render with square corners - rounding works everywhere else.

Email templates

Each notification is built from blocks - heading, text, image, button, products, divider, and spacer - that you drag to reorder and edit in each of your site's languages. The Products block opens a picker where you filter by name and category and choose products to show as linked cards. The Cross-sell block is offered only on order-related emails (such as Order confirmation and Review request): you set a heading, subtext, and how many products (2–4), and the products themselves are chosen automatically per order from the ordered items' "goes well with" links (see Products). The editor shows example cards labelled "Example - the actual products are chosen per order"; if an order has no configured recommendations, the whole block (heading included) is hidden. The locked Order / booking details block shows the structured data (items, time, totals) and is filled in automatically; you can't delete it, but you can move it among the other blocks. The Delivery details block is locked too and is offered only on order-related emails: it shows the payment method, the courier and where the parcel goes (city, postcode, office or parcel locker), the delivery price, and the two columns Billing address and Delivery address with the customer's name, address, phone and email. It is in the default layout of every order email (confirmation, your own notification, tracking, pickup reminder, review request), so the customer always sees where their parcel is headed. Its contents come from the real order and aren't editable, but unlike the details block you can move or remove it - and once removed it reappears in the Add block list. A live preview with sample data sits beside the editor - for orders it shows your first product as a sample (real emails list the customer's actual items). If you have filled in Bank transfer details (see Settings), the preview of Order confirmation and Order received (awaiting confirmation) shows an order paid by bank transfer: it opens with the "How to pay" box carrying your bank details, exactly as a customer who chose bank transfer gets it, and the delivery details say Bank transfer. Cash-on-delivery customers don't get this box. Without bank details the preview stays a cash-on-delivery order, because your shop then can't take bank-transfer payments. The Send test button emails a copy of the current design to your own inbox, so you can see it in a real email client. Disabled notifications are not sent. Only the templates your site actually uses are shown - booking notifications (such as New booking and Booking reminder) appear only with the Booking calendar add-on, and order notifications only with the online shop.

Withdrawal received (acknowledgement) is a mandatory email. When a customer withdraws through the "Withdraw from contract here" link (Art. 52a of the Consumer Protection Act), they immediately get a confirmation with the withdrawal number, the date and time it was sent and its content - the law requires it on a durable medium. So the template carries the Mandatory badge: there is no switch to turn it off and you can't add blocks - you change the intro text only. The rest (the withdrawal details, what happens next for the customer and your shop's details) is filled in automatically and shows in the live preview. Withdrawal: item declined (Art. 57) is mandatory too - it goes to the customer when you decline an item of a withdrawal as an Art. 57 exception, naming the item and the exception; you change its intro text only. The New withdrawal from the contract template is the alert to you: it carries the whole statement and a link to the withdrawal in Contract withdrawals. See Withdrawal from contract.

Automated codes

The screen is split into three tabs - Templates, Automated codes, and Theme. The Automated codes tab is where you switch on a personal promo code that is issued automatically and dropped into a given email.

The code is personal and single-use: each customer gets their own (for example MARKETING_7K2FQ4 - the label you set plus a random ending), and it works only for them, only once. The random ending cannot be guessed, so nobody can arrive at someone else's code. For each code you set the discount type (percent or fixed amount), value, validity in days, code label, and optionally a minimum order value. An example of the code your customer would receive is shown under the fields.

If you sell with quantity pricing, each card also has an Includes products with quantity pricing switch, off by default. Off: the code does not apply to products with quantity pricing - the customer pays the row price. On: the code also cuts every row. A code keeps the setting it was issued with, so a code already sent works by the rule it was promised under, even if you change the switch later.

There's no upper limit on the discount, but above 30% we'll ask you to confirm - personal codes can still combine with your automatic promotions, so the real discount may be deeper than the number you see.

All three triggers are live:

• Marketing welcome - issued once, the first time a customer opts into marketing (from their account, at signup, at checkout, or by subscribing to your newsletter), and travels in the Welcome (marketing opt-in) email.
• Abandoned cart - goes into the cart reminders. Since there are three of them, you choose which ones carry the code; only the 3rd reminder is ticked by default, because an earlier discount is spent on a shopper who might have come back anyway. The code is created when the first ticked reminder goes out, so that is when its validity starts. A shopper who receives two ticked reminders gets the same code - nobody collects a fresh discount per email.
• Order confirmation - a code for the next order, carried by the confirmation email. The confirmation itself is transactional and goes to every buyer; the code is marketing, so it's added only for customers who consented to marketing.

Customers enter the code in the Promo code field at checkout. They do not need an account - the code is matched to the email address they type at checkout, as long as it is the one the code was sent to.

The code appears in its own box in the email, just above the button - you don't need to touch the template wording. If you'd rather mention it in the subject or the body, insert the Promo code variable (and Promo code valid until for the date) from the variable list in the Templates tab. If you haven't configured a code, the email still goes out - just without the discount paragraph.

Abandoned-cart emails

If a shopper adds products to their cart and enters their email at checkout (or subscribes to your newsletter with a full cart) but doesn't complete the order, ZweiHost can automatically send them up to three reminders with the cart contents and a "Complete your purchase" button that restores their cart in a single click. The three steps are separate templates (Abandoned cart, Abandoned cart 2 and 3) - each with its own wording, delay, and on/off toggle (they appear only with the online shop). Each step's Send after (minutes) field sets how long after the *previous* reminder it goes out (defaults: 60 minutes, then 24 hours, then 72 hours). You can drop a different promo code into each step's text - or let ZweiHost issue a personal one-time code and pick which reminders carry it (see Automated codes above).

The sequence stops at the first step you turn off: disabling step 2 also disables step 3 automatically (we'll let you know). Reminders go only to shoppers who consented to marketing, and stop as soon as the shopper completes an order. Every email carries an unsubscribe link - once a shopper opts out, they get no further cart reminders (independently of the newsletter). Results are tracked in Reports → Abandoned carts. (Available on the Pro plan and up.)

Product pictures in the reminders and in the restored cart stay visible even if you remove the photo from the product, or delete the product, in the meantime: ZweiHost keeps every picture a stored cart shows for as long as that cart is kept (up to 90 days).

Favourite on sale

The Favourite on sale template is used to tell customers that a product they favourited is now discounted. You edit it like any other notification (heading, text, a Products block, a button), but it has no "Order details" block - the product is the content. It's sent two ways. Manually: the Bulk email button in Customers → Favourites opens this template pre-filled with the chosen product so you can review it, optionally edit it (including picking a promo code), and send. Automatically: while the template is enabled, once a day ZweiHost checks which of your customers' favourited products are currently on sale (a markdown or an active automatic promotion) and sends each customer one email listing their newly-discounted favourites - each customer is notified only once per sale. Both ways send only to customers who opted in to marketing and count toward your monthly marketing-email limit (shared with the newsletter). (Requires the Customer accounts add-on, Pro plan and up.)

Review request

The Review request template automatically invites a customer to leave a review once their order has been delivered (marked "Received"). The Send after (minutes) field sets how long after delivery it goes out (default 7 days). The email shows the order and a button that takes the customer to their order page, where they can rate each product they bought. It's sent only to registered customers (who can sign in to leave a review) and requires the Reviews and Customer accounts add-ons. It's transactional (not marketing), so no marketing consent is needed. It's sent at most once per order; turn the template off if you don't want these invitations.

Sending domain

Your emails are sent automatically from your website domain. The setup (the DNS records and the "Verified" status) now lives in Settings → Domain, below the domain editor - see Settings. If you don't have a custom domain yet, email is sent from the shared ZweiHost address until you add and verify one; until then newsletters stay as drafts.

Next step

One thing left before your first sale - the documents your site publishes. See Legal pages.