Admin: E-Mail Templates

Overview

Hotcakes lets you create an unlimited number of e-mail templates that you can use for your e-commerce needs. We also have several pre-made templates already available. You can edit these pre-made templates to customize them for your business or use them as-is.

Requirements

The following prerequisites will be necessary to accomplish the goals of this article:

• Have access to your Hotcakes store administration
• Working knowledge of HTML and CSS
• Basic understanding of tokens or placeholders
• Basic understanding of how e-mails are generated

Getting Started

There are no tasks required to proceed with this article.

Administrating Your E-Mail Templates

E-mail Templates are found in the control panel menu.

A list of templates is shown when you first arrive on this page.

Available E-Mail Templates

There are a number of e-mail templates that are already available for you to edit and use, and you can even create more of your own.  Here's a listing of what's available to you already.

Template Name	Description
Admin Affiliate Approvement	The message sent to the primary store e-mail address when a new affiliate signs up.
Affiliate Approved Confirmation	The e-mail message sent to the primary store address when an affiliate is approved.
Affiliate Registration Confirmation	The message sent to affiliates when they sign up. This is not the approval message. It’s just confirmation that the affiliate signed up.
Abandoned Cart	Reminder message sent to known customers after they abandon their shopping cart.  This is great to customize with promotions to entice them to come back.
Admin Order Receipt	This is a confirmation message sent to the primary store new orders e-mail address to notify that an order has just been placed.
Contact Abandoned Cart Users	Mass message to all users who have recently abandoned their shopping cart.
Drop Shipper Notice	E-mail message sent to drop shippers after an order has been paid.
Forgot Password Template	Message sent when customers need to resolve authentication issues.
Gift Card Notification	This message is sent to individuals who have been designated as a gift card recipient.
Order New Receipt	This e-mail message is sent to customers after their order is placed.
Order Shipment	A message that is sent when a package has been marked for shipment during the order management process.
Product Role Assignment	This message is sent to customers when a product role is assigned to their account as part of the order workflow process.
VAT Invoice	This e-mail is sent when a VAT is enabled in the store. This invoice is necessary for European sellers.

You can add a new e-mail template by clicking the Add Custom Template button in the left panel. 

You can also edit an existing template by clicking the pencil icon next to the corresponding template name.

The Edit E-Mail Template page opens.

Notice that the template is created using HTML, and a standard template from e-mail and subject fields are used in the From E-mail and Subject text boxes. These text boxes are generally the same for all e-mails.

In addition to the text for your templates, you can also use tokens as placeholders.  They'll later be replaced with actual information when the e-mail is generated, such as the customer name. These tokens are listed in the left panel under Available Tokens.  The tokens you see here will vary, depending on the type of e-mail template you're editing.

You can click a token in the list and then click the "Add Selected Token Above" button to include it in your template. These tokens allow you to dynamically assign values to your messages. For instance, Affiliate.AffiliateName adds the affiliate’s name to the message.

The Body section is where you store your HTML template. Notice that tokens are also contained in the HTML body. Also, your body may have a repeating section to edit.  The repeating section will be injected into your e-mail, wherever the [[RepeatingSection]] token is found in the Body of your e-mail.

Click Save Changes at the bottom of the page to save your changes.