Reviews: email reminders not being sent

[gourmetdelights]

For the "Reviews Configuration" I have the "Email reminder settings" set for 14 days so my shoppers/customers should get an email reminder 14 after an order is placed.

Placed an order myself 31Mar2013 using my @me.com email address. Never got the email reminder asking for me to leave a review. Checked with some friends and family who ordered last month, also no email reminder.

ShopSite® Pro 11 sp2 r4 with Verio.com as my host. http://www.gourmet-delights.com is my domain

Thanks for any insights you can provide.

[Jim]

Have you accessed the backoffice of your store recently? There is not a "cron" job that sends the emails, they are only sent when the merchant accesses certain screens in the backoffice. start.cgi, orderhandler.cgi I believe are the two cgis that trigger sending the emails.

ShopSite just passes the emails off to the sendmail application (or smtp server) that is configured for the store, and that server actually does the sending. You might want to check with your host to see if they have a mail filter on the server that might think the emails are spam and is blocking them from going out.

I assume that receipts for orders are being received? If they are then ShopSite would also be able to pass the review emails to the sendmail server.

[gourmetdelights]

Jim, as always, thank you for your prompt and thoughtful reply.

I will say that the https://gourmet-delights.com/cgi-bin/ss/orderhandler.cgi is always open on my computer and I check for orders about every 30 minutes by hitting "list all" when I am at my desktop.

So that is not it.

I also do receive emails/receipts for orders when they are received. That has always worked flawlessly.

HOWEVER I visited the https://gourmet-delights.com/cgi-bin/ss/start.cgi page by clicking on the ShopSitePro logo on my screen and I FINALLY received emails asking me to write a review from orders placed on 23March and 31March. So there was some backlog.

So I'll remember to visit that start.cgi page daily.

I'm not certain why I DO get the emails telling me there is a new order like clockwork, but I do NOT get the emails prompting me to write a review. But if the answer is just me remembering to visit start.cgi that is a decent enough work around.

Thanks again.

[Jim]

The merchant emails about a new order are sent at the same time the email receipt is sent to the shopper. They are triggered by execution of the thankyou.cgi (final step of the shopping cart process). Since the emails for requesting the shopper write a review are sent some time after the order is placed there needs to be something that triggers sending of the email. Since it is not possible on most servers to set up a cron job, which must be done as root in most cases, the next best way is to trigger the sending when the merchant goes to the backoffice. Since most merchants would login to their store on a regular basis start.cgi is the logical place to put the trigger. Since you leave your browser window open and never execute start.cgi that is why the emails weren't being sent. So just remember to hit start.cgi every day to get the queue of emails sent for the day. NOTE: You can just click on the ShopSite above the navigation in any backoffice screen to go to start.cgi.

[gourmetdelights]

Jim, thank you again. I've made triggering start.cgi part of my daily routine.

Another quick question on this topic if you'll allow. Since I wasn't triggering start.cgi there are some people who never received an email.

Is the right answer to just enable the email reminder for say 300 days and then trigger start.cgi? Will that get everyone?

Or do I need to back it up one day at a time and then trigger start.cgi with each new date? I assume people will not get multiple emails for each order.

Thanks again.

[Jim]

I'm not sure if multiple emails will be sent if you change the time frame for when the emails are sent. I'm also not sure of how long the data for the review emails is kept around. Note that the setting is for how many days to wait before sending the review so it may not work to set it to a large value and if you do then it will delay the sending of the emails for new orders until the time that you set. If you do set it to a larger number of days I would think that 30 days would get you the most response. Anything longer ago than that the shopper might wonder why they are getting an email and may have already used or forgotten about the product. And once you set it and the emails are sent you should probably change it to a lower number again so the emails for newer orders will be sent out sooner.