Email Templates (Premium & Classic Styles)
Customize the transactional emails your store sends — order confirmations, shipping updates, OTPs and more — in a visual builder.
Your store sends transactional emails automatically — when an order is placed, shipped, delivered or cancelled, when a payment is confirmed, and when a customer resets their password or verifies with a one-time code. The Email Templates gallery lists each of these emails and lets you customize them in a visual editor before they reach your customers.
Screen: Templates → Email & SMS Templates.
How it works, in one paragraph
- The gallery lists the seven editable transactional templates: Order confirmation, Shipping update, Order delivered, Order cancellation, Payment confirmation, Password reset, and OTP / verification code. The other templates the platform sends (vendor emails, returns, account/platform notices) show as quiet "not yet customizable" cards further down the gallery — they have no Edit or Preview at all yet, not a disabled one.
- A starter style toggle at the top offers two design directions, Premium (a warm, editorial design) and Classic (the solid-banner design stores send today) — see the note below on what it currently affects.
- Edit opens a template in the visual builder. Preview renders a real compiled email in a dialog.
- Your edits autosave as a draft in this browser — they are not applied to outgoing emails until the template is saved through the builder's own save flow.
Previewing a template
Clicking Preview on a card compiles that template and shows the rendered result — the same header/body/footer layout, fonts, and colors a customer's inbox would receive — in a dialog, with the merge fields (customer name, order number, item list, and so on) filled in with sample data so the layout reads naturally. While it's compiling, the dialog shows an email-shaped loading skeleton rather than a blank screen; if the compile fails, an inline error with a Retry button appears instead.
Preview shows the starter design, not your saved edits
The gallery card's Preview always renders that template's starter composition — the same default content Edit opens with — filled with sample data. It does not reflect content you've customized and saved in the builder. To see your own saved edits rendered, open Edit and use the builder's own preview inside the editor, or send yourself a test of the live template through the normal order/account flow that triggers it.
Preview does respect the starter style toggle above the grid — switching between Premium and Classic and clicking Preview again shows the corresponding design. This is the one place the toggle currently has an effect; see the callout below for what it does not affect.
Choosing a starter style: Premium vs Classic
The style toggle sits above the template grid (in the v2 admin theme it appears as a pill selector). It has two options:
| Style | What it looks like |
|---|---|
| Premium | A warm, editorial design — cream background, serif display headings, terracotta accents, compact order tables. |
| Classic | The solid-banner design your store's emails use today: a colored banner header with a white title, white body, and a plain summary table. Banner colors are semantic per template — indigo for order and account emails, green for delivered/payment confirmations, red for cancellations. |
The toggle doesn't change what Edit opens with yet
Today, clicking Edit always opens the builder with the Premium starter, regardless of which option this toggle is set to — the toggle isn't wired through to the builder yet. Once you're in the builder, you can still customize every part of the email by hand; you're not limited to the Premium starting point's look.
Editing in the builder
Edit opens the template in the email builder:
- Add content from the block palette (headings, paragraphs, buttons, dividers, order-summary blocks and more) — click a block to add it to the email.
- Reorder body blocks by dragging them with the grip handle.
- Edit text inline by clicking into any text block and typing.
- Style controls (font size, weight, colors) in the toolbar apply to the selected block and carry through to the real sent email — what you style is what customers receive.
- Subject line and preheader have their own fields at the top of the builder. The greyed text in an empty subject field is an example placeholder, not a saved value — type your own.
Troubleshooting
- "My edits disappeared on another computer." Drafts autosave locally in the browser you were editing in. Finish and save a template in the builder before switching devices.
- "Why don't customers see the change I made?" Customers receive the template your store has saved and activated — an unsaved draft in the builder doesn't reach outgoing emails. Check that you completed the save flow after editing.
- "Preview doesn't show what I edited." Expected — the gallery card's Preview always renders the starter design with sample data, not your saved builder content (see the callout above). Use the builder's own preview, or check a real sent email, to see your actual edits.
- "Preview shows an error instead of the email." The compile step failed — select Retry in the dialog. If it keeps failing, it's worth a support ticket; there's no way to see the rendered layout without a successful compile.