Emails

Ambikly sends transactional email through WordPress's own wp_mail(). This page covers the Emails screen, exactly which emails exist, the smart tags you can put in them, and how to test that they arrive.

The Emails screen

Open Ambikly → Emails. The screen is a left-hand section list and a right-hand editor:

• General — settings that apply to every Ambikly email.
• Order Notification — sent when an order is placed, or when a digital-only order is paid.
• Order Status Change — sent when an order moves to a new status.

Each of the two event sections holds a Customer template and an Admin template, editable independently. Changes are saved with the Save changes button in the header; nothing saves as you type.

Only four transactional emails exist

The free core ships exactly four editable emails: order notification to customer, order notification to admin, order status change to customer, and order status change to admin.

There is no shipping-notification email, no cancelled-order email and no refund-notification email. Refunding an order sends the customer nothing. If the refund pushed the order into refunded status, the generic order-status-change email goes out — but it is not a refund notice and does not mention the amount.

If you need a shipping notification, the Shipment Tracking add-on covers that case.

General settings

Setting	Option key	What it does	Default
Disable all emails	ambikly_disable_all_email	Master kill switch. Stops every Ambikly transactional email.	Off (no)
Admin email recipients	ambikly_admin_email_recipient_lists	One address per line. Receives every admin-targeted Ambikly email. Falls back to the WordPress admin email when empty.	Empty
"From" name	ambikly_email_from_name	Display name on outgoing customer email. Falls back to the store's from_name setting, then to the site title.	Empty
"From" email address	ambikly_email_from_address	From and Reply-To address on outgoing customer email. Falls back to the store's from_email setting, then to the WordPress admin email.	Empty
Hide "Powered by Ambikly" footer	ambikly_disable_powered_by_link_on_email	Removes the credit line from every transactional email footer.	Off (no)

The three toggles store the literal strings yes and no, not booleans. The recipient list is split on newlines and commas, and each entry is sanitized as an email — invalid entries are dropped silently.

Tip: An empty From name or From address is not simply "unset" — PHPMailer rejects a message with a blank From outright. Ambikly guards against this by falling through to the store settings and then to the site defaults whenever either field is an empty string.

Per-email settings

Each of the four emails has three settings of its own.

Setting	Option key pattern
Enabled	ambikly_enable_email_{event}_{audience}
Subject	ambikly_{event}_subject_for_{audience}
Content	ambikly_{event}_content_for_{audience}

{event} is order or order_status_change. {audience} is customer or admin. So the four enable keys are:

• ambikly_enable_email_order_customer
• ambikly_enable_email_order_admin
• ambikly_enable_email_order_status_change_customer
• ambikly_enable_email_order_status_change_admin

All four default to on. An email only sends when both the master switch is off and its own toggle is on.

Leaving a subject or content field blank restores the built-in default. The plugin deletes the option row rather than storing an empty string, which is what makes the fallback work. The placeholder text in each field shows you what the default is.

Content is filtered through wp_kses_post, so ordinary HTML survives but scripts do not. You supply only the inner body — the shared header and footer wrap it, so you cannot break the email's outer HTML by editing a subject line.

When each email fires

Email	Fires on	Notes
Order notification → customer	Order created, and again when the order is paid	Skipped at creation time for a digital-only order, because the real confirmation with download links goes out at payment time.
Order notification → admin	Order created	Only at creation, not again on payment.
Order status change → customer	Every status transition	Needs a customer_email on the order.
Order status change → admin	Every status transition	Skipped when the admin recipient list resolves to nothing.

The customer order email splices in anything returned by the ambikly_order_email_extras filter just before the closing table of the body shell — this is how download links and license keys reach the customer without forking the layout.

Smart tags

Smart tags are tokens replaced in both the subject and the body at send time.

Tag	Expands to	Shown in the UI
	The order number, falling back to the order id	Yes
	The order total, formatted in the order's currency	Yes
	The order's customer email	Yes
	The billing first name, or "there" when unknown	Yes
	The billing full name, falling back to the email, then "there"	Yes
	The tokenized invoice URL for this order	Yes
	The site title	Yes
	The site home URL	Yes
	The status the order left	Status-change emails only
	The status the order moved to	Status-change emails only
	The order's current status slug	No
	The payment method title, e.g. "Direct Bank Transfer"	No
	A deep link to the order in the Ambikly admin	No

The last three work in every Ambikly email even though the token chips on the Emails screen do not list them. is particularly useful in the admin templates — it takes a staff member straight to the order.

and expand to raw slugs such as on-hold, not to the display labels.

Tip: Click any token chip under a template's content field to copy it.

Add your own tags with the ambikly_all_smart_tags filter. Keys arrive already wrapped in braces:

add_filter('ambikly_all_smart_tags', function ($tags, $order) {
    $tags['{{tracking_url}}'] = 'https://track.example.com/' . $order->order_number;
    return $tags;
}, 10, 2);

Subject and message filters

Every subject and body passes through a filter, giving eight hooks in total. They run after the stored option and before smart-tag substitution, so a filtered value can still contain tags.

Hook	Type	Changes
ambikly_order_subject_to_customer	Filter	Order notification subject, customer
ambikly_order_message_to_customer	Filter	Order notification body, customer
ambikly_order_subject_to_admin	Filter	Order notification subject, admin
ambikly_order_message_to_admin	Filter	Order notification body, admin
ambikly_order_status_change_subject_to_customer	Filter	Status change subject, customer
ambikly_order_status_change_message_to_customer	Filter	Status change body, customer
ambikly_order_status_change_subject_to_admin	Filter	Status change subject, admin
ambikly_order_status_change_message_to_admin	Filter	Status change body, admin

Two more hooks wrap every send: ambikly_email_send_before and ambikly_email_send_after, both with no arguments. They are useful for swapping in an SMTP configuration around Ambikly's mail only.

Careful: ambikly_email_from_name and ambikly_email_from_address are WordPress options, not filters. Use update_option(), not add_filter().

The two hard-coded system emails

Two more emails exist that are not on the Emails screen and cannot be edited there.

Low-stock and out-of-stock alerts

Sent to the store admin when a paid order drops a stock-managed product to or below its threshold.

• Fires on ambikly_order_paid, after stock has been decremented.
• Digital line items are skipped — they have no stock.
• The threshold comes from the product's own low_stock_threshold meta when set, otherwise from the store-wide Low Stock Threshold under Ambikly → Settings → Store, defaulting to 5.
• Two variants: "Out of stock" when the quantity reaches zero, "Low stock: {name} ({n} left)" when it is at or below the threshold.
• Throttled to one email per product per level every 6 hours, so a burst of orders cannot flood your inbox. The throttle is a transient keyed by level and product id.
• The body carries the product name, SKU and current quantity, plus a link to edit the product.
• Fires ambikly_inventory_alert_sent with the level, the product and the quantity.

Alerts go to the WordPress admin email. The master "Disable all emails" switch does not cover them — they are sent through wp_mail() directly, using the same From name and address as everything else.

See Inventory & stock.

Company buyer invitation

Sent when you invite someone onto a B2B company account. Subject: "You've been added to {company} on {site}". The body tells them they can now place orders on that company's terms and asks them to sign in or register with that email address.

It is not editable and has no toggle. See B2B companies & Net Terms.

Deliverability

Customer email and admin email are sent with deliberately different headers.

	Customer email	Admin email
From header	Set to your configured From name and address	Not set
Reply-To	Your configured From address	Your configured From address
Content-Type	text/html; charset=UTF-8	text/html; charset=UTF-8

Admin notifications deliberately omit the From header so WordPress's own default sender applies — an address on the site's own domain. That keeps admin mail SPF-aligned and stops it being filed as spoofed when your From address is on a different domain from the server sending the mail.

Recipients are sent one message each, not one message with multiple recipients, so a single bad address in the admin list cannot suppress the rest.

Further deliverability notes:

• Ambikly does not bundle an SMTP layer. If your host's PHP mail is unreliable, install a dedicated SMTP plugin — it will pick up these messages like any other wp_mail() call.
• Set a From address on a domain you control and that your SPF record authorizes.
• The "Powered by Ambikly" footer link is the only outbound link in the default templates. Removing it with the General toggle is fine and does not affect anything else.

Previewing

Each template has a Preview ↗ link that opens the resolved HTML body in a new tab, with smart tags already expanded.

• The preview uses your most recently created real order as sample data. If the store has no orders yet, a stub order numbered SAMPLE-1001 totalling $19.00 is used instead.
• Status-change previews always substitute processing for and completed for .
• The preview URL is on the front end, in the form ?action=ambikly-email-preview&email_type={event}&email_to={audience}, and requires manage_options.

Careful: Preview renders the saved template, not the unsaved text in the editor. Save before previewing.

Sending a test

Each template has a Send test field and button.

1. Enter a recipient address under the template you want to test.
2. Click Send test. The screen saves your current edits first, so the test reflects what is on screen.
3. Check the inbox. A test uses the same sample-order data as the preview.

A test is a real send through wp_mail(), with the same headers the live email would use — an admin-audience test omits the From header just as the real one does. If wp_mail() returns false you get an explicit "wp_mail() returned false. Check your mail configuration." error, which almost always points at the host's mail setup rather than at Ambikly.

Troubleshooting

Symptom	Likely cause
No Ambikly email arrives at all	ambikly_disable_all_email is set to yes, or the host cannot send mail. Send a test to distinguish the two.
Customer emails arrive, admin ones do not	The admin recipient list is empty or contains only invalid addresses.
Subject arrives empty	The subject was saved with content that sanitized down to nothing. Clear the field entirely to restore the default.
A status-change email did not send	The order has no customer_email, or that event's toggle is off.
Digital order sent no confirmation at checkout	Expected. The confirmation for a digital-only order goes out at payment time, with the download links included.
A tag printed literally as	It is not a real tag. Check the spelling against the table above.

See also Troubleshooting.

Permissions

The Emails screen and its REST routes require manage_options. Neither the Store Manager nor the Support Agent role can reach it — raw HTML editing is deliberately kept to Administrators. See Roles & permissions.

Where to go next

• Customers — the account area customers land in from these emails.
• Invoices & packing slips — what points at.
• Orders — the status transitions that trigger the status-change email.
• Hooks & filters — the complete hook reference.