• Replace the built in merchant and customer confirmation emails with better formatted HTML emails.
• Email to any of your drop-ship manufacturers listing the Ship To address and the products to be shipped if using real time credit card authorization. The module will sort out which drop shipper gets which emails, including listing the products to be shipped. Unlike some other vendors' drop ship notification modules, this one only includes the products belonging to the associated drop shipper. Thus a drop shipper does not see the products being supplied to the customer by other drop shippers when the order contains multiple product sources. You can still use the module if you are not using real time authorization, but you would send the email to your pending mailbox until manual processing verified the charge, then forward to the drop shipper. This would save hand entering the order. In addition to the email, an archive flat file is created which you can use to easily track sales activity related to each of your drop-ship manufacturers.
• Email to Ship To or Bill To or both thanking them for a donation to your sponsored charity on your site.
• Email to your shipping department listing Ship To address and products ordered if using real time credit card authorization. Products section can be cut/folded to result in a shipping label with your company address included. If not using real time authorization, use the pending mailbox technique similar to the drop shipper scenario above.
• Email a promo coupon code if a customer purchases a specific product or from a list of products
• Email service, warranty, shipping and contact information on specific products or product lines
• Send an email to your cell phone's inbox when orders are placed in your store (requires a cell phone plan that assigns an email address to your phone).
• You own a mall with multiple stores within the mall. Those store owners rent the stores from you for a percentage of their gross. Use mail manager as an audit tool to track their sales. In addition to the autoresponse email, mail manager produces a flat file with order ID, date, product name, product code, quantity, price for each, and price extended. Periodically retrieve that flat file and import into a spreadsheet for easy analysis.
• The included Mail Manager Report module can display the contents of that flat file through admin. It can filter the report by specific time periods (daily, weekly, monthly) within reason. The limits of your PC or server may prevent very lengthy reports for excessively long time periods. It can also limit the report to only one product code. Since the templates can be designed for each vendor, you can create individual vendor flat files with a corresponding report for each vendor.
• Literally, you can have a different autoresponder for every product in your store.

However, Mail Manager has a somewhat open architecture so that other events can also trigger an automated response. For example:

• Send a welcome email before the order completes, but after the new customer completes the registration process, i.e. with with new customer account creation
• Send a thank you for rating a product (using the Emporium Plus Rate This system) along with a coupon code for taking the time to do so
• You can use the ifvar script or var token in these "other event" emails. For example, generate a unique coupon code with a module token and insert it in the welcome email to give the new customer an incentive to buy now.
• Use a render token to send an email from any page in the store. For example, put it on the product page to send a specific email when a specific product's page is viewed by a customer who is logged in. The email goes to their password recovery address (but could be bill to or ship to address). If you want it sent to a hard coded address, e.g. yours to monitor traffic, you would put your email address in the 3rd parameter of the token. The uses of this feature are endless. Send a coupon to entice customers to buy when they visit specific product screens. Tell them about other products related to the one they just viewed.
• Customers can send a snapshot of almost any page in your store to himself, a friend, or himself and a friend. Why settle for a link on a tell a friend email when you can send a screenshot of the whole page. Customers can use this feature to send the basket page to the purchasing department to obtain approval for purchase. Or send it to himself and use it for a wish list from which he can add products to the basket directly from the email. You can also create a form with a text input (instead of hidden) so the customer can choose the page to send, instead of just the one they are on.
• You can create and email an unlimited number of contact forms in Merchant, i.e. formmail. You simply create a page with the form inputs on it. Then create a page that receives, interprets and validates the inputs. You can include a random generated math challenge to cut down on spammers. You can validate inputs with store morph technology (Merchant page template) code and send the customer back to the original form if there is a problem with an input. Using the page snapshot sending feature above, the completed page (from form data) is then sent via email to the email address of your choosing.

As you can see, the uses of this Mail Manager are quite diverse. Some of the variable features configured through admin for each template are:

• Show or hide any of the data elements
• Orient your email either horizontally or vertically
• There is also a free form template using an extensive list of tokens and mini-scripts to customize the emails that are sent at the time of order completion. They can vary from mimics of the standard merchant notification and customer confirmation emails to brief order notifications for better acceptance within cell phone emails. The emails can be plain text or HTML formatted emails for better readability. In Merchant 5.x store morph emails, you can have a multipart email with plain text for email clients which do not display html along with the html formatted text. The email client will automatically determine which format to display. You can change the fonts, colors, layout and even add images to your confirmation and notification emails.
• If your shipping and payment modules are configured with invoice notices, these can be included in the emails with a token. You can include data from other 3rd party modules, like Addendum, by using tokens.
• You can also create packing slip and label emails with the "ship to" country address formatted according to the applicable country's postal recommendations when using the HTML template.
• In the free form template you can also set the time so that it can be offset from the server time, thus display for a different time zone in each of your emails.
• You can display the values in custom fields. In the main body you can display custom customer field values if the customer created an account (order and welcome emails). In the product section you can display custom product field values. The install doc has more information on how to use the tokens to display the data.
• Customize your email and store's physical address
• Designate email recipient, i.e. Ship To and/or Bill To and/or fixed email address
• List full or partial Ship To and/or Bill To address
• Restrict email to a specified order dollar value range, reward big spending customers with a coupon for their next visit
• Restrict email to a specified list of countries, thus allowing for language specific emails
• Resend order emails if the customer knows and enters the order number and email which match the actual order. The form for these two data elements can be placed anywhere you can edit the store user interface, e.g. headers, footers, welcome screen. In addition to being a nice feature for customers, it is useful for you if you want to re-send emails while you edit the email text and layout.
• You can specify the product code and an attribute/option value that must also be met before the email will be sent. This is particularly useful when the emails are used for vendor notification. A certain product might be drop shipped by two different vendors and the only difference is the selected attribute/option value.
• Insert a "require" token that has to be met before the email will be allowed. As example, have a checkbox using Addendum to ask a customer if they want to be added to a list server (mailing list). Then if they check the box, the "yes" response is sent to Mail Manager. The Mail Manager can then generate a specifically formatted email to activate an email address at your list server, if you have one.
• Write a different body for each of the email templates you add
• List products and prices or just the products without prices
• Link the email usage to one or more product codes or entire inventory with wildcard
• No need to go to each product to link the email, a copy and paste from a flat text file will add hundreds instantly

I'd be surprised if you find that this capability exists anywhere in any mid-priced shopping cart system. Autoresponders that fill in the blanks are one thing, but this is a store owner, pre-planned autoresponse for a specific product or the whole order. Within your store, you could have dozens of different responses (individual or grouped) or a wildcard response for all of the products. You can use it to make connections not directly related to sales, yet linked to a specific sale.

• Customer buys a kayak from your store. Tell them about the kayak camp 20 miles from your store and give them the 800 number of the guy with the info about a big get together next month.
• Customer buys an orchid from you which would lead you to believe he/she may have a specific variety you have been looking for. You autorespond with your want list for your nursery in hopes of finding the needle in a haystack.

As you can see, this list could be endless. Targetted, intelligent autoresponders are designed to increase your store's business and decrease the amount of time employees spend on sending out product specific, emails.

The pre-formed templates are easy to configure and do not require programming experience. For the more experienced, you also have the option of using tokens and mini-scripts in free form templates (both legacy 4.x tokenized and 5.x store morph technology). Example free form templates are included with the install documents.

The module currently fully supports the mivasql configuration of MIVA Merchant 5. It also supports MySQL as long as load balancing has the data stored on the single MySQL server and permissions are set correctly on the data directories. This would be the case in most of the server setups. If you are using Merchant 5.x and your host is web.com, you will not be able to use this module due to the way they configure their servers. There are no known issues with other hosts.