How to Send Out Automatic Receipts with the Receiptful Plugin

Some of the top online stores are able to survive and ultimately thrive because they know how to bring back customers who have already purchased from them. It’s a well know fact that you don’t have to spend as much time or money bringing in past customers as opposed to brand new customers. So why are you not sending out receipts with upsells from your online store?

Every receipt you send out is an excuse to start selling to that customer again. You could give them a shipping coupon or maybe try to coax them with some other related products they might be interested in. Regardless, receipts work for improving your customer lifetime value and for targeting those who have shown interest before.

For that reason, I’m going to walk you through how to automatically send out receipts with the help of Receiptful, a plugin that works with WooCommerce and Shopify. Keep in mind that we will be using the WooCommerce extension for this, and there are plenty of other extensions to make your store awesome.

What is Receiptful?

Receiptful is a completely free plugin that anyone can install on their WordPress sites. It is designed for use on ecommerce sites, so that you can automatically send out a receipt whenever someone makes a purchase. Like stated before, it works seamlessly with WooCommerce, and it provides a nice little receipt designer and editor right in your WordPress dashboard.

Sending out a receipt is nice for giving your customers something to put in their files, but the main benefit of the plugin is actually for the online store owner. When you send out a receipt it’s one of the best opportunities you have to bring back customers to your store. In fact, you can add links to related products, try to bring them back with coupons or even offer free shipping for their next order.

In short, the Receiptful plugin gives you a quick way to create your receipts, add an upsell (or a way to get people back to your online shop) and track how well the receipts are working. The system also works with platforms like Shopify, Magento and EasyDigitalDownloads. Overall, the setup process is easy to understand and the receipt designs are really nice looking.

You can view how the Receiptful developer views its own plugin with this video:

How to Send Out Automatic Receipts with the Receiptful Plugin

Step 1: Install and Activate the Receiptful Plugin

To start you need to download the Receiptful plugin right here. The easiest way to install the plugin is to go to the Plugins tab on the left hand side of your WordPress dashboard. Go to Add New, then search for the Receiptful plugin. Install and activate the plugin so it’s ready to use on your WordPress dashboard.

Step 2: Get Your API Key for Receiptful

Although it’s a wonderful thing that Receiptful integrates directly with WooCommerce, this connection also makes it a little weird trying to find the settings for Receiptful. It doesn’t actually have it’s own little tab on the left hand side of your WordPress page.

Go to the WooCommerce tab in your dashboard (go here and install WooCommerce if you haven’t done so already, since it’s required for sending out receipts,) then go to Settings > Receiptful. The first task required is to punch in an API code to activate the plugin.

This is a little strange, since the plugin is completely free, but it’s part of the process, so let me show you how to do it. Create an account on the Receiptful website, fill in all of your information and make sure you punch in your website correctly in order for the API key to work.

Once you create your own account the system gives you an API key to copy and paste into the Receiptful Settings area we talked about before in your dashboard. Hit the Save Changes button and it should give you a message that Receiptful has been successfully activated.

This is really the only general setting you need to change before getting into the real meat of Receiptful.

Step 3: Design Your Receipts

I was a little blown away by the Receiptful interface, because I didn’t quite understand where the right buttons were, but once I realized it, I was floored by its elegance and simplicity.

It may seem like you should have to go somewhere else to start designing your receipts, but you still remain in the Receiptful tab under the WooCommerce Settings page. There are only two links you need to worry about for setting up your receipts, and they are both located underneath the API key you just inserted.

Click on the Edit My Template link. This brings up one of the sleekest editors I’ve seen in a while; and it’s all from a free plugin!

Keep in mind that you no longer have to leave this page while creating your receipts. Only exit out of the Reeiptful interface if you are completely done with your receipts, because nothing else in the WordPress dashboard is going to help you out.

This page should be designated as the Template page. This is where you can view the receipt that’s going to send out when someone purchases an item from your store. It’s a visual editor, so you can see all your changes on the right hand side. Start by clicking in the text areas to change what you want the receipt to say.

Most of the receipt information pulls in automatically, such as the addresses and pricing, but you can modify the logo, the thank you message and even the little footer area that includes a support email address.

Step 4: Show Variables

If you look to the far right hand side of your screen you can see a little tab that says Show Variables. Click on this to reveal a module that slides out from the right.

This tells you a list of smart tags you can punch into the email. For example, you may want to insert the date in all of these emails, but you don’t want to change the date manually for every single receipt. Just use the proper smart tag and the receipts generate the right date every time.

Step 5: Manage Your Primary Settings

If you look to the far left of your receipt template, you can find the area for filling in your primary settings. These settings fill in for all of the receipts you use, so make sure they are accurate and acceptable. Keep in mind you can always change these later.

Start uploading your logo, changing the primary “from” email address and the email subject line. You can also include items like social icons, messages, color codings and more. I particularly like that you can change the language settings and date formatting, since many stores are selling to people all around the world.

Once you’re done with designing your template and making it look wonderful, click on the large Save Template button below the template preview on the right. This saves the template as your primary receipt for going out when people buy items from you.

There’s also a button to send a test email to the account linked up to your WordPress account. You’ll notice that every email receipt also comes with a PDF receipt attachment for printing it out if needed.

Step 6: Including an Upsell with Receiptful

I feel that the best part of sending out receipts with an online store is the chance to upsell your customers and bring them back to your store. Customer retention is a huge problem with online stores, but the receipt gives you a unique chance to remind people that they might have missed something on their first purchase.

Click on the Upsells tab at the top, and click on the Add Upsell button. Choose whether you want to offer a discount coupon, shipping coupon, related product or some sort of custom upsell. Let’s say for this one we’re going to offer a shipping coupon for the next order.

This step creates a nice coupon for the customer to use. For the next step create a title for the coupon and designate where you want the coupon to show up on the receipt. I would recommend placing it at the top so people actually see it. Type in a description, upload an image if needed and place an action URL if you are trying to push people to a certain page on your website. You also have some settings for including an expiration date and limiting the amount of coupons a single customer can use.

After all of this is done, just click on the Save Upsell button on the bottom of the page to continue.

Step 7: Check Your Statistics

One of the last tabs contains all of your reports so you can see exactly how many customers are interacting with your receipts. Click on the Home tab and you’ll see all the statistics and reports available through Receiptful. It’s strange that they named the tab Home, but I don’t really care about that.

Use this page to track how well the receipts are helping your brand. Check to see how many receipts are going out, if people are opening them and if the receipts are leading to more conversions. This page provides a detailed breakdown from every month and day, so you can see if there was a lull in the conversions or anything like that.

Step 8: Add Your Social Links

In addition to selling more products, sending out receipts helps you build your social followings. If you go to the Profile tab, go to the bottom to fill in all of your social link information. These automatically drop into your receipt template so you don’t have to worry about adding them yourself.

Step 9: Don’t Forget Live Mode

You’re not done yet. The last step you have to walk through is pretty darn quick. At the top of the page you’ll notice a switch called Live Mode. Flip this switch to the On option and your receipts will start sending out to the customers. This is a great feature in case you need to change something and you don’t want anymore receipts going out while you make those modifications.

That’s it for automatically sending out receipts with WooCommerce and the Receiptful plugin. If you have any questions about the plugin feel free to drop a line in the comments section below. Sending receipts is a wonderful way to improve your customer retention, and since this plugin is free, why not? Feel free to check out some cool WooCommerce themes to go with this plugin.