Transactional emails for Shopify

Transactional emails are triggered by a specific customer action — like placing an order, or requesting a refund — rather than sent as part of a marketing campaign. Shopify sends its own version of these by default: order confirmation, shipping, and refund emails.

Sending transactional emails through Bloomreach instead lets you brand them, personalize them with profile and behavior data, and track them alongside the rest of your campaign analytics. To do this, turn off Shopify's version first.

🚧
Warning
Turn off Shopify's native order confirmation email before you enable transactional emails in Bloomreach. If both stay active at the same time, customers receive duplicate order confirmation emails.

Prerequisites

Ensure you have the Shopify Plus plan. Non-Plus stores can't disable Shopify's native transactional emails.

📘
Note
Transactional emails aren’t marketing communications, which is why they don't need marketing consent.

Set up transactional emails for Shopify

Turn off Shopify's native order confirmation email

Contact your Shopify CSM or Shopify Support from your own Shopify account and ask them to:

Disable the native order confirmation email, and let them know Bloomreach will send it instead.
Confirm in writing once it's disabled, and clarify which compliance or critical emails Shopify keeps sending regardless.

Keep both confirmations for reference. Once you have them, place a test order to confirm no Shopify email arrives before you continue.

🚧
Warning
This request must come from you, not from Bloomreach.

Set up transactional emails in Bloomreach

Ask your Customer Success Manager to enable the transactional email API for your project. It's disabled by default.
Give your API key the Campaigns > Transactional email API permission.
Follow Transactional emails to set up your template and choose a trigger method. See the Transactional email API reference for the endpoint, authentication, and payload details.

Go live

Only trigger the Bloomreach order confirmation email once Shopify confirms theirs is off. Otherwise your customers get both emails for the same order.

Behavior

Delivery infrastructure

Transactional emails run on separate infrastructure from campaigns. A large marketing send doesn't slow them down.
Transactional emails support attachments, such as invoices.
An optional fallback module lets you configure two ESP integrations. Bloomreach picks one at random for each send and falls back to the other if it fails.

Tracking and bounce handling

Bounce management is relaxed. Bloomreach ignores the email_invalid flag and only checks basic syntax and spam-trap lists.
Analytics track transactional emails under the transactional_email action type.

Content restrictions

Transactional emails must stay limited to the triggering action.

Allowed:

Details of the order, shipment, or refund tied to the transaction.
Shipping address, tracking number, and delivery date.

Not allowed:

Coupons or discount codes.
Products the customer didn't order.
Newsletter content or sign-up links.
Marketing calls to action.

Including disallowed content can affect the message's transactional status and may create compliance risk under regulations like GDPR, CASL, and CAN-SPAM, which restrict mixing marketing content into transactional communications.

Limitations

Bulk emailing: not supported.
Unsubscribe header: not included.