Why Having a Transactional Email Service is Crucial for your Online Store

Transactional Email Delivery Issues

There is probably no single factor that causes more frustration and delays in order fulfillment than erratic delivery of transactional emails such as order and shipping emails.

I could go into a long list of issues caused by non-delivery of order related emails but I am sure you have had some exposure to failures of email delivery already!

Starting from payment (unsuccessful or otherwise) along the fulfillment chain to the final shipping of an order, any non-delivery causes delays and frustration, as anyone on the end of an unhappy customer conversation can attest.

Thus, it is vital for any ecommerce shop owned worth her salt to implement the most up-to-date transactional email system available. 

Professional Transactional Email Systems

There are a number of providers available. Click here to see a current Google SERP list. 

If your store is using some variant of LINUX sendmail or Postfix to process and deliver ecommerce generated emails, I would urge you to stop doing this immediately and transition to a professional provider as quickly as possible. 

We have used SendGrid and SMTP2GO expensively over the years and can recommend their services.

The most immediate benefit you will gain is visibility of the fate of emails sent from your store.

Here is a look at our SMTP2GO Activity Console with successful deliveries filtered out. It looks something like the image below and shows rejected and bounced emails.

Critically SMTP2GO allows for an individual mail to be clicked on, revealing more detail about a non-delivery.

Here is a snapshot of the detail screen. Note that you can dig into the email headers to review the actual delivery conversation, which is useful when debugging email issues.

It is highly recommend that your sysadmin or email admin reviews this kind of report on a regular basis. In fact, I would suggest it becomes a daily task. You will soon realise the value of this kind of monitoring. Not least, it will identify attacks and bot invasions far quicker than the normal process of picking up the pieces when dealing with the results of an attack.