Create a Simple Order Form Email Receipt in WordPress

Are you looking for a simple solution to send a simple order form email receipt from your WordPress form? When you are working on your form, you don’t want to waste time sending separate email receipts or looking for expensive plugins.

With Ninja Forms, you have a number of options at your fingertips for generating simple order email receipts. Whether you need a simple email receipt, a downloadable pdf, or a custom bill of sale sculpted to a very specific format, we have you covered. Read on to see your options!

Sending a receipt as an email notification (free)

If you just need to email an order receipt, or a simple quote request form without actually sending any document, setting up an email notification is the easiest way. By doing this, you can automatically send a WordPress auto-reply email without a need for a plugin.

All you want to do is include the data from the form fields in your email body with the use of our merge tags. So, let’s take a look at how you can send a receipt via email to your customers.

Set up an order confirmation email in Ninja Forms

Once you are in your Ninja Forms builder, head over to the Emails & Action tab. Click the blue plus sign icon to add a new Email action. We renamed this action to Order Confirmation.

Once you open this action, you can enter the email address, subject, and email message. If you want to send the confirmation to additional email addresses you need to use a comma separator. You can learn more about sending an email with Ninja Forms here.

You’ll want to pay attention to the Email Message section. This is the part where you can include all the information from your order form or a quote form and send an email notification to your customer with confirmation data.

If you want the email receipt to contain all form fields data, you can simply use the merge tag {fields_table}. This will display all the fields that have data entered into them.

If you have a quote form, our calculation feature is perfect for coming up with a total quote. You can also display this information on your email receipt by using our merge tag for calculations. If you have a payment form, you can send an order form receipt with payment details too!

As you can see, Ninja Forms gives you the ability to create automatic online receipts in WordPress in a matter of minutes. The downside of this option is your customers have to get creative to save this receipt as a record, print the email, or copy/paste it to another digital document.

Luckily, we have another option for you that lets you send an order form email receipt as a PDF attached to the email. Keep reading to find out more!

Send a PDF order receipt via email

Create a simple PDF order receipt from the form submission

If you simply want to create an order receipt from your order form that includes all existing form fields without any customizations, you can simply head over to the Emails & Actions tab. Next, you want to add an email notification action, and open the Advanced dropdown > Toggle on the Attach PDF button.

This will enable the PDF of the WordPress form submission to be attached to your Email Actions, and users will be able to save or print out that PDF directly from their email. Remember, you need to have your PDF Form Submission installed to access the Attach PDF option.

Above, we showed you how you can generate a PDF order receipt from your form. This setting will only generate a simple PDF document without any customization.

However, in most cases, you want to provide your customers with a professional, standalone pdf receipt that can be easily associated with your company. This means, the ability to include the company logo, header, and footer.

You might want to customize the body of your PDF receipt with only specific form fields, so only the necessary fields display. With Ninja Forms, all can be easily accomplished. Once you install the PDF Form Submission add-on, you will have the following options for PDF receipt customization:

 

Custom Document Title
Text entered into this setting will appear as the document’s title on the page. The setting supports the use of merge tags. Please note if you disable the Document Title setting, the name of your form will be displayed on the customized PDF order receipt.

Custom Document Body
If you don’t want your PDF order receipt to include all fields from your form, enable Custom Document Body. Here, you can customize the PDF order receipt to your liking using our rich text WYSIWYG editor for WordPress.

The merge tags and HTML is supported. Depending if your order contains a payment, you will be able to further use our merge tags for specific payment methods such as transaction ids, last 4 credit card digits, etc.

 

In order to make changes to your order receipt using the HTML editor, you’ll want to click the < >. If you want to go back from the HTML editor, you simply click < > again.

 

If you need to make additional out-of-the-box editing for the PDF itself such as using a specific font or making any other adjustments, you can alternatively look into using the PDF Builder for Ninja Forms by RedNao. They do not have very many installs, but they are actively working on the plugin and have had numerous updates throughout the year.

Document Header
After you toggle on the Document Header, you’ll get a set of options for customizing the header of your PDF order receipt. In this section, you can upload your company logo, enter your company name, address, contact information, and more.

Document Footer
Once you enable this option, you will be provided with footer settings. Here, you can position the footer either to the left, center, or right. You can also turn on the option for Pagination. When this setting is on, it adds a page number in the footer of each PDF page. If you wish to add additional information to the footer of the order receipt, you can use the section Additional Info.

Here, you can either insert your address or use our merge tags. In some cases, you might want to include the time and date the order receipt is generated. You would use {other:time} and {other:date} merge tags to show the submitted date and time of the order.

Custom Document Filename
This setting lets you customize the name of the PDF order receipt for every customer using our merge tags. If your form does not contain payment and you would like to give your PDF receipt an order number, you can use our {other:random} merge tag that will generate a random ID.

However, keep in mind to use this merge tag only once on your PDF. If you use this merge tag more than once, each time the merge tag is used, it will generate a different random set of characters. The last thing you want to do is to confuse your customers.

If your form is accepting payments and you would like to include the details from your transaction, you can use merge tags. For example, for the charge id from the Stripe payment, you can use {stripe:chargeID} merge tag. For the PayPal transactions, you can use {paypal_express:transaction_id} merge tag.

Bonus: Order Receipt Example

Lastly, for the demonstration, we created a simple customized order receipt with the PDF Form Submissions add-on. Under the Advanced tab > PDF Form Submission we enabled the Custom Document Body. Here, we inserted the merge tags for the form fields we want to include in the order receipt.

We disabled the header as we wanted to use the image across the entire PDF width. If you would like to display only a small logo (left, center, right) you can enable the header and insert the logo, or additional data within.

As a result, here is the order receipt in the PDF format that was sent to the customer’s email address:

That’s it! As you can see, creating a customized email receipt with PDF Form Submission is easy! You can even attach this receipt to the email address with one single button. Afterward, your customers can download the PDF directly from their email.

Now, you are ready to send email receipts!

From a simple email to an elaborate, branded document, you can send pretty much any type of purchase acknowledgment to your customers. Maintain a professional brand image and keep your customers happy with Ninja Forms!