How To Email A Customer Through Admin Panel, I want to send random email to customers via the orders interface Options

[Franciscus]

Our dispatch team sometimes only get tracking numbers days after they put the order as "shipped" due to dropshipping particulars.

What we want to do is e.g. two days after we set the order to "shipped", email the customer with a blurp that has text that we pasted into the email, with a tracking URL for example.

I did not find a possibillty to do this. All I saw was hard-coded (changable though) email templates.
ZenCart lets you type anything you want and send it to the customer as an "order update".

Does Avactis have such a feature and if not, is there a workaround?

If not, it would be a great feature because it would not just be very handy - it would also form a database of shop/customer history, where all communication on returns, refunds etc. can be retrieved.

[DonH]

I don't know of a way to do what you want in the current cart features. The best way to make feature requests is to use the feedback forum by clicking on the blue feedback button on the left.

[Franciscus]

I found a perfect workaround:

I need to send customers two emails with two tracking numbers, days apart.

I simply modify the tracking number for the "Order Completed" email, and changed the body of the default text that came with Avactis.
So now we can send two customized email with different tracking numbers and different hard-coded tracking URL's.

[DonH]

Hmm. Are you having to edit the body with the new tracking number for each email sent? I've not played with it before.

[Franciscus]

What I did was to modify the email body of the email sent with "Order Change" - "Completed".

I modified the text to say something like: "There is another tracking number available for the rest of your shipment and it is {trackingnumber}"

Then I let the dispatch person set the order status to "Completed" and paste in the new tracking number.

That way, we can send the customer two different emails with two different tracking numbers.

[DonH]

So...you are still opening the customer's order and entering the tracking number on that page. I would change the workflow a little. I would add an Email notification sent on Order Status Changed and make that change be Ready To Ship. That would be what I would send before I have the tracking number. When I have the tracking number, either because I am shipping direct or I've received it from the drop shipper, I would enter that number on the customer's order page and set the status to shipped. It's a flow that would be logical to someone new and actually, you don't really know that a drop shipment has actually shipped until you have the confirmation number. You have transmitted the order to ship (Ready to Ship) but can't be sure that it actually has at that point. This way the flow would still be the same whether you ship from your location or drop ship. You could skip the "Ready to Ship" when shipping from your location if acquiring the tracking number makes that step unnecessary.