A customer never got their Shopify order confirmation email. What should you do?
First, check the fulfillment status
Everything about this request depends on one fact: has the order shipped yet. If it is unfulfilled, you have options. If it is fulfilled or in transit, you are no longer editing an order, you are arranging an exchange, and the conversation with the customer changes completely. Check the order timeline before you promise anything, because the wrong promise here creates the refund dispute you were trying to avoid.
In the Shopify admin, open the order and look at the fulfillment status first, the payment status second. An unfulfilled, paid order is the easy case. A partially fulfilled order means some items can still change and some cannot, which you need to explain clearly. Train whoever answers customer messages to check this before typing a reply; most bad outcomes in this scenario come from promising an edit that was never possible.
When you can edit the order
For unfulfilled orders, Shopify lets you edit: add or remove line items, change quantities, and adjust the order total, with the customer charged or refunded the difference. This is the cleanest path when the customer wants a different size or color of the same product. Make the edit, confirm the new total with the customer in writing, and note that the edit itself is the confirmation; do not also send a separate "we changed it" email that confuses the thread.
Edits have limits worth knowing. You cannot change the order into something unrecognizable without confusing your own records, and editing does not work once fulfillment has started. If the price difference is significant, get explicit approval before charging the extra amount; an unexpected charge on a card is how a simple size swap becomes a chargeback.
When to cancel and reorder instead
Cancel and reorder is the right call when the change is extensive (half the items are different), when the customer wants to add items that change shipping weight or method, or when the original order is already fulfilled. It is also cleaner when the customer is clearly unsure; a fresh order with a fresh confirmation beats three rounds of edits that nobody can follow.
The mechanics matter: cancel the original, issue the refund promptly, and create the new order, ideally as a draft order you send for the customer to approve and pay. Do not cancel without the replacement ready, or the customer experiences it as "my order was cancelled" rather than "my order was fixed." Speed of the refund is the whole ballgame here; a same-day refund turns a hassle into a loyalty moment.
What to tell the customer
The message template that works: confirm what you are doing, state the timeline, and name the money. "I have updated your order to the blue in size medium. The $12 difference has been refunded and should appear in 3 to 5 business days. Your order still ships Thursday." Every element answers a question the customer would otherwise ask in a follow-up message, which is the real cost driver in these exchanges.
If you cannot do what they asked, say so in the first sentence and offer the alternative immediately. "That order already shipped this morning, so I cannot change it, but here is what I can do: refuse the delivery or send it back with this prepaid label, and I will ship the correct item today." Bad news first, solution second, no hedging in between.
Preventing it next time
A sizing chart linked at the point of size selection, a clear "final sale" flag on items that cannot be changed, and an order confirmation email that arrives within minutes all reduce these requests. The confirmation email is the cheapest intervention: customers who catch their own mistake within the hour are easy to help, while customers who notice three days later are not.
Track how often this happens and why. If size swaps dominate, your size guide is failing. If customers keep adding forgotten items, your checkout may be rushing them. The pattern in the requests is free product-page research, and merchants who read it stop answering the same email every day.
Start with where the email usually went
The order confirmation is sent automatically the moment an order is placed, so a missing one is almost never a Shopify delay. The common destinations are the spam or promotions folder, a mistyped email address at checkout, a work inbox with aggressive filtering, or the customer checking a different address than the one they ordered with. Each has a different fix, so the first support step is identifying which case this is rather than apologizing generally.
Ask the customer to search their inbox for the store name and order related terms, and to check spam, before anything else. A surprising share of these tickets close at that step. If the email truly is not there, look at the address on the order itself: a transposed letter or an old domain explains the silence, and the order timeline shows the address the confirmation was sent to.
How to resend and fix the address
From the order in the admin, the confirmation can be resent to the customer, and the order's timeline shows the notification history. If the address on the order is wrong, correct the customer's email on the order or customer record first, then resend, because resending to the same wrong address accomplishes nothing but a second silence.
While you are there, confirm what the customer actually needs. Most want the order number and the reassurance that the order exists, both of which a support reply can provide immediately even before the email question is resolved. Solving the anxiety first and the email second is the order of operations that keeps the ticket friendly.
When one missing email means a store wide problem
A single report is a customer issue. Several reports in a short window are a store issue, and the usual suspects are recent changes: a new custom email domain or sender setup, DNS records altered during a migration, or an authentication problem that is sending every notification to spam across providers. Place a test order to your own addresses at more than one provider and see where the confirmation lands.
Email authentication, the SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records behind your sender domain, decides whether receiving providers trust your mail. If those records were disturbed by a domain or platform change, confirmations, shipping notices, and abandoned checkout emails all degrade together, which is why a cluster of missing email reports should always be treated as a deliverability investigation, not a run of careless customers.
Prevention: catch it at checkout and after
Most address typos can be caught by the customer themselves if the confirmation screen and the order status page are easy to find, so make sure order lookup routes are visible in the store footer and in support replies. Encourage account creation or Shop style order tracking where it fits the store, since tracked orders do not depend on one email surviving a spam filter.
For the store, a monthly test order that verifies the full notification chain, confirmation, shipping, delivery, lands correctly is cheap insurance. Notifications are the store's voice between purchase and delivery, and the time to learn they are broken is from your own test, not from a week of increasingly annoyed customers.
Related reading
If this topic is useful, these earlier guides go deeper on connected questions: Shopify flagged an order as high risk. What should you do before fulfilling it?, How do customers check a Shopify gift card balance, and what can merchants see?, and How does store credit work on Shopify, and when should a store offer it?.
Frequently asked questions
How do I resend an order confirmation email in Shopify?
Open the order in the admin and use the resend option for the order confirmation, checking the notification history in the order timeline to confirm it was sent. If the email address on the order contains a typo, correct the address on the order or customer record before resending, otherwise the second copy goes to the same wrong place. Give the customer the order number in your reply as well.
Why did the confirmation go to spam?
Receiving providers judge your store's email by its authentication and reputation. Missing or broken SPF, DKIM, or DMARC records, often after a domain change, push notifications into spam across many customers at once. A single customer landing in spam can also be their provider or filters. Clusters of reports mean check your email domain setup; isolated reports usually mean check the customer's folders and address.
The customer typed the wrong email at checkout. Can it be fixed?
Yes. Update the email address on the customer record or order in the admin, then resend the confirmation and any pending notifications to the corrected address. The order itself, payment, and fulfillment are unaffected by the typo. If the customer also cannot access order status pages tied to the old address, updating the record restores that too.