Troubleshooting | Customer Order Notifications
What We'll Cover
Customer order notifications, such as invoices and order status updates, are sent automatically to your customers from the email address in your store profile. It is essential that this email uses the same domain as your store's domain or there could be issues when your customers' email providers check the validity of the emails being sent.
Use the troubleshooting steps below to identify why customers are not receiving order notifications and invoices, and how to fix this issue, then review our recommended best practices to prevent this issue from happening again.
Troubleshooting
The primary cause of bouncebacks and failed deliveries is the use of free third-party email services, such as Yahoo or Gmail, as your store profile email address. If you are using one of these as your store email address, your customers will not be able to receive store notifications, and you will receive bounceback emails due to their DMARC policies.
To check this address, go to Settings › Store profile. This email address acts as the "from" address that order notifications are marked as coming from. In reality, the order notifications are coming from BigCommerce's servers.
Best Practices
- Don't use free third-party email
- Make sure your SPF Record is set up and current
- Specify your provider's SMTP details
Don't Use Free Third-Party Email
Best practice is for the profile email to have your domain name, not a third-party domain. After that, it is a matter of making sure all of your DNS records are set up correctly, especially your SPF Record. An SPF Record is a type of DNS record that identifies which mail servers are allowed to send email on behalf of your domain.
If you are pointing your domain to BigCommerce but would like your email hosted with a third-party service such as GoDaddy, Google Workspace, or Zoho, you will need to update your store's MX records.
Make Sure Your SPF Record Is Set up and Current
Make sure to add the host's SPF to the TXT record in BigCommerce. This will be BigCommerce's way of showing that it has been authorized to send mail under the name of your email host. Double-check with your email host to see what their SPF record is, but it will look similar to: include:_spf.XXXX.com.
Example SPF Record
Specify Your Provider's SMTP Details
If you are pointing your domain via a CNAME or A Record, you will need to contact your email host to find out if you can use their SMTP details. Using their SMTP server provides you more control over your emails and is useful if you have email spoofing protections in place on your business email.
If you are not able to use their SMTP server, you will need to add BigCommerce's SPF record (include:_spf.bigcommerce.com) wherever your nameservers are located. For example, if you are using GoDaddy as your email provider, you will need to log into their control panel, find their DNS records, and update the SPF record to contain include:_spf.bigcommerce.com.
Receiving a blacklist bounceback? If you receive a bounceback due to a blacklist or MTA reputation error, then one of our mail servers may have been flagged for sending spam. Save a copy of the bounceback email and contact our support team. We will investigate further and reach out to the services that listed the server to have it removed from their lists.