AbleCommerce Shopping Cart Software

Hello everyone,

I am trying to implement a custom order status that will send out an email to the customer notifying their refund has been completed.
I created a new Order status using the following setting:

Name: Refund Completed
Display name: Order canceled and refunded
Includes in report: none
Cancelled order: yes
Inventory status: unspecified
Select triggers: none selected
Select emails: TESTING Refund email (the email that is suppose to be sent out)

Correct me if my logic is incorrect, this custom order status should be completely independent from the financial process of refunding credit back to our customer, since no triggers are selected that will move the order to this status. Meaning, we would have to manually update an order's status to Refund Completed, and only then would the TESTING Refund email be sent out to the customer.

However, I am not receiving the emails whenever I update the status to Refund Completed. I have already used another trigger to test the email template, and have received it in the past (so Nvelocity coding error is definitely not a culprit here).

I've been living in this forum for the past week and still couldn't find an answer to this problem. Any help would be much much appreciated. Thank you in advance.

You are correct in your logic, however the system doesn't work that way. Email templates do not send when the order status is changed. They only send when a particular trigger is fired.

Since you haven't selected any triggers, the email will never go.

Thanks for the quick reply Joe, that is what I was expecting. Is there any way around this? I tried using the trigger called "order status updated", still no luck.

Unfortunately, not without custom programming. You would have to modify both the order summary page and order details page to process the status change. If the status change met your criteria i.e. set to Refunded, then fire more custom code that pulls in the proper email template and sends the email.

I've made the change for a few customers before - takes a few hours, but when it's done it works just like they want it. The only downside is you can't control an accidental trigger of the email - once the status is set, the email is sent.

You can get close though. Change your refund procedure so that after the refund is issued through payments, go back to order details, click the link email address for the customer and select your "refund sent" email template. Not automated, but still gets the job done and only a few clicks extra.

Thanks Joe, that made complete sense. Although the only reason why we would even go through all the trouble to send these emails is to send a copy of the emails to a email account that logs all these outgoing emails, since AC7 does not seem to have email logging capability yet.

Currently our refund procedure is exactly what you said in the third paragraph. It works very well, except that method only sends out the body/subject of the email template. Meaning, it ignores CC and BCC, so there is no way to log the email to an email account by using BCC.

Thanks again for the quick reply

I've made the change for a few customers before - takes a few hours, but when it's done it works just like they want it.

Do you happen to have a template of sorts that can be easily adjusted to match my situation? I just need to send out an automatic email "Backorder Notification" when an order is manually changed to the custom order status of "Backorder - Full"