Generic WooCommerce emails look like generic WooCommerce emails — plain, unbranded, easy to mistake for spam. Post-Purchase Hub lets you fix that without writing a line of code. Why this matters more than it seems Order status emails are some of the highest-open-rate messages a store sends, because customers are actively waiting for them. A branded, clear email builds trust; a generic one just gets skimmed or ignored. Where to edit templates Go to WooCommerce → Post-Purchase Hub → Notifications. Each order status has its own template — confirmation, shipped, cancelled, return approved — editable independently. Adding your logo and colors Upload your logo once and it applies across every template. The accent color field controls buttons and the order-status highlight inside the email, so it’s worth matching to your site’s primary brand color. Personalizing the copy Merge tags like customer first name, order number, and estimated delivery date can be dropped into any template. A short, specific line (“Hey Sam, your order is on its way!”) reads far better than a form-letter greeting. Testing before you go live Use the built-in “Send test email” button to preview exactly what customers will see, including how it renders on mobile. Check this before publishing any change — email clients are notoriously inconsistent with formatting.

Your cancellation window and return policy are the two settings that shape almost everything customers experience with Post-Purchase Hub. Here’s how to set both well. Choosing a cancellation window by product type There’s no single right answer — it depends on how fast you fulfill. A few starting points: Standard physical goods: 30 minutes to 24 hours Perishables or made-to-order items: 5 to 15 minutes Digital downloads: usually no cancellation window at all, since delivery is instant Print-on-demand: 10 to 30 minutes, since production starts almost immediately Store-wide default vs. per-product override Set one sensible default for your whole catalog, then override it on individual products that need special handling. This keeps the settings screen simple while still covering edge cases like fast-turnaround custom orders. Writing a return policy people actually read Skip the legal boilerplate. State the return window in days, what condition items need to be in, and who pays return shipping — in that order, in plain language. Customers skim; a policy they can read in ten seconds gets followed more often than one buried in a wall of text. Syncing to your fulfillment workflow Every return request logs to your store-owner dashboard the moment it’s submitted, with the order details attached — so whoever handles fulfillment doesn’t need a separate handoff or spreadsheet to track what’s pending.

WooCommerce’s default order status is a plain text list. Post-Purchase Hub replaces it with a visual timeline your customers can actually read at a glance — and you can customize every part of it. Where the timeline shows up By default, the timeline appears on the customer’s account page under each order, and again on the order confirmation screen right after checkout. Both use the same settings, so you only configure it once. Renaming and reordering steps The default steps are Placed, Confirmed, Packed, Shipped, and Delivered. If your fulfillment process looks different — say you have a “Quality Check” step, or skip “Packed” for digital goods — you can rename, remove, or reorder any step from the settings screen without touching code. Matching your store’s branding The timeline’s accent colors (completed, current, upcoming) are all adjustable, so it can sit naturally inside your theme instead of looking like a bolted-on plugin. Most stores match “completed” to their brand’s primary color and leave “current” as a warm accent so it’s easy to spot at a glance. Theme compatibility The timeline is built to inherit your active theme’s fonts and spacing automatically. If you’re using a heavily customized theme and something looks off, the settings screen includes a CSS override field for quick manual fixes. Once it’s styled the way you want, customers stop guessing where their order stands — and stop emailing you to ask.

A clean install is the foundation for everything else Post-Purchase Hub does, and there is genuinely not much to it: upload, activate, walk the seven-step wizard, place one test order. The wizard itself claims about two minutes, which is roughly right if you already know your shipping times. This guide covers the whole path from zip file to a live order timeline, with the exact screens and settings you will see along the way. What you need before you start It supports both High-Performance Order Storage and legacy post storage, so you do not need to change how WooCommerce stores orders first. Step 1: Install the plugin Two routes, both from Plugins → Add New. Search for WPMake Post-Purchase Hub and click Install Now, or choose Upload Plugin and select the zip. WordPress handles the extraction itself — no FTP, no unzipping, no file manager. Step 2: Activate Click Activate once the install finishes. Activation on its own changes nothing on your storefront — a notice appears pointing at the setup wizard, and until you finish that wizard your customers see exactly what they saw before. That is worth knowing if you are installing on a live store mid-morning: there is no window where the site looks half-configured. Step 3: Run the setup wizard Click Run the setup wizard from the notice, or start it from WooCommerce → Post-Purchase Hub. It opens with a question rather than a settings form, and your answer decides which of the remaining steps you are shown: The full path runs Welcome → Statuses → Delivery → Tracking → Actions → Display → Finish. Every step has a Skip this step link, and a skipped step keeps a sensible default you can change later on the settings screen. Two steps are worth slowing down for. Statuses is where each WooCommerce status you use — including custom ones added by other plugins — is mapped onto a stage the customer sees, and where you mark internal statuses as not shown. Delivery is where handling time and per-shipping-method transit times go; skip it and customers simply see no estimate, which is honest but not very useful. The timeline walkthrough covers both screens in detail. Step 4: Choose how it appears The Display step is the one that decides how much of your theme is involved, and the safe answer is the default: Stay additive unless you have a specific reason not to. The preview underneath is built from an actual order in your store, so what you see is what a customer would have seen. Then press Finish and go live. That is the moment customers start seeing timelines. Step 5: Find your settings Everything afterwards lives at WooCommerce → Post-Purchase Hub, with six tabs down the left and a Search settings… box that filters as you type: Read the Status panel before you walk away. Nothing in it is a setting — it is what the other tabs have added up to. It states whether setup is complete and your order pages are live, whether a tracking plugin was detected, whether an invoice plugin was found, whether any template conflicts exist, when the daily cleanup next runs, and whether the database is up to date. Step 6: Place a test order Log in as a test customer, place a small order, and open My Account → Orders. The order table gains a Progress column showing the current stage and its timestamp, and only the actions that actually apply to each order. Open the order and you get the full Order progress list — Placed, Confirmed, Packed, Shipped, Out for delivery, Delivered — each marked Done, In progress or Not yet, with an estimated delivery range underneath. Then move the order along a status from the admin and watch the timeline follow. One thing that surprises people: orders placed before you installed the plugin show their stages without dates. WooCommerce does not keep a history of status changes, so the plugin can only record them from the moment it is active, and it shows an honest blank rather than an invented date. Run wp wpmphub backfill-timeline from WP-CLI to fill in what can be derived from the dates WooCommerce does store. Optional: guest order lookup If a lot of your customers check out without an account, enable it under Settings → Guest Access, then put the [wpmphub_order_lookup] shortcode on a page and link it from your footer or your order emails. It is off by default, and it is built so that guessing reveals nothing: the customer enters an order number and billing email, and the signed link is emailed to the address already on the order, never to the address typed into the form. It is rate limited, with a link lifetime you control. First-run checklist Frequently asked questions Will this break my theme’s My Account page? It is designed not to. Additive mode adds sections through WooCommerce’s own hooks and leaves your templates alone. Full replacement is opt-in, and the plugin checks first whether your theme has customised those templates — if it has, replacement stays off rather than producing a broken page. Do I need a tracking plugin for it to be useful? No. Without one, customers see a delivery estimate worked out from your handling and transit times. If you do run Advanced Shipment Tracking or WooCommerce Shipment Tracking, real tracking data replaces the estimate automatically and you do not have to do anything. What happens to my data if I delete the plugin? Nothing is deleted unless you ask for it. Settings and request history stay in place, so reinstalling picks up where you left off. If you would rather it cleaned up after itself, switch on Delete all data when uninstalling under Settings → Advanced first — that one has no undo. Does it send anything to an external server? No. The plugin makes no outbound HTTP requests of any kind — no telemetry, no update pings, no remote fonts

Every cancellation that arrives by email costs you the same four minutes: read it, find the order, check whether it has shipped, reply. Post-Purchase Hub moves the front half of that onto the customer’s own order page. They submit a structured request with a reason attached; you get a queue with two buttons instead of an inbox thread. What it does not do is cancel anything on its own, or issue a refund. Both are deliberate, and understanding why is most of what you need to set this up well. Why manual cancellation handling costs more than it looks A single cancellation by email spans three tools: the inbox, the WooCommerce order screen, and whatever you use for refunds. None of them know about each other, so you carry the context in your head between them. Do it ten times in a week and it is an afternoon. The expensive part is not the decision — that usually takes seconds. It is the retrieval: working out which order the email refers to, checking its current status, remembering whether this customer already asked once. A request that arrives already attached to the order removes all of it. Step 1: Install and run the wizard From Plugins → Add New, install and activate the plugin, then run the setup wizard. Nothing reaches your storefront until you finish it. The full installation guide covers the requirements and all seven steps if you want the detail. Step 2: Choose which actions customers get The wizard’s Actions step — later WooCommerce → Post-Purchase Hub → Actions — asks what a customer can do about an order without emailing you. There are four, each an independent toggle: Turning an action off is not cosmetic: it is removed from the customer’s order pages and refused at the API, so a hidden button cannot be submitted anyway. Reorder and invoice are close to risk-free. Cancellation requests are the one worth configuring properly before you go live. Step 3: Set the cancellation request rules This is the core of the setup, and it works differently from the countdown timer most people expect. There is no “cancellable for 30 minutes” setting. Eligibility is driven by order status: Cancellable statuses is a set of checkboxes over your WooCommerce statuses, and the button disappears the moment an order leaves them. That is a better model than a timer, because it tracks reality: an order that is already packed should not be cancellable at minute eleven just because your window said thirty. In practice your effective cancellation window is however long orders sit in the statuses you ticked before your team moves them on — worth measuring before you set anything. There is more on choosing them well in setting cancellation windows that actually work. Three supporting fields sit alongside it: Restock on approval is the fourth. Switched on, approving a cancellation returns the items to stock. Refunds stay in WooCommerce, one click from the notification — the plugin never touches a payment gateway. Step 4: See what the customer sees Log in with a test account, place an order, and open My Account → Orders. Alongside the new Progress column, each order shows only the actions that apply to it: Request cancellation on eligible orders, Buy these again on completed ones, View or print order and Get help with this order throughout. The dialog itself is doing quiet but important work. It opens with one sentence — “This sends a request to the store — it does not cancel your order right away. We usually respond within 24 hours.” — then asks for a Reason from a dropdown and offers an Anything else? (optional) box before Send request. Step 5: Work the queue Requests land under WooCommerce → Requests, with a count in the menu of everything waiting on you. The list has All types and All statuses filters and sortable columns for request, order, type, age and status — so you can pull the oldest pending cancellations to the top in one click. Open one and you get the order, a link straight to it, the items, the customer’s chosen reason and their note, and an Internal note (not shown to the customer) box above the Approve and Decline buttons. Approving changes the order status and optionally restocks; declining leaves the order exactly as it was. Requests also appear on the WooCommerce order screen itself, so you are never surprised by one you did not know about. A checklist before you go live Frequently asked questions Does it cancel orders automatically? No, and it never will. A request lands in the queue and nothing happens to the order until you approve it. If you were hoping to automate the approvals themselves, the honest answer about auto-approval is worth five minutes. Does it issue refunds? No. Approving a cancellation changes the order status and optionally returns items to stock. The refund is done in WooCommerce, on the order, one click from the notification. Why can one of my customers not request a cancellation? The button hides itself, correctly, when the order is not in a cancellable status, when a request is already pending on it, when the order has hit its per-order limit or is inside the waiting period, or when you have switched the action off. Where to go from here Cancellation requests are one half of the picture; visibility is the other. Pair this with a customised order status timeline so customers can see where an order stands before they think about cancelling at all. If you are heading into a flash sale or run a subscription box, both have wrinkles worth reading first.

If you have just switched on self-service cancellation requests, the next question is almost always the same: can I approve the easy ones automatically? It is a fair thing to want. Reviewing forty low-value cancellations a week is not a good use of anyone’s morning. The honest answer is that Post-Purchase Hub will not auto-approve anything, and the readme is unusually direct about it: “No, and it never will.” Here is the reasoning, and what to do instead — which, in practice, gets you most of the speed you were after. Why nothing is approved automatically The plugin’s position is that a cancellation request lands in a queue and nothing happens to the order until a person approves it. No rule engine, no “under fifty dollars goes through”, no exceptions. The Actions settings say the same thing twice, in the card description and again in the help text under the status checkboxes: a request is never an automatic cancellation. The reasoning holds up. Approving a cancellation is not a data operation — it is a claim about the physical world. Has the parcel been picked? Has the label printed? Has it already left with the courier? WooCommerce order status is a decent proxy for that, but only a proxy, and the gap between the two is exactly where an automatic approval does damage: stock returned for a parcel already on a van, a customer told their order is cancelled while it is in transit to them. The second reason is scope. The plugin never touches a payment gateway and never issues a refund; approving changes the order status and optionally restocks. An automatic approval would therefore produce a cancelled order that is still fully paid, quietly, with nobody aware of it. That is a worse outcome than a request sitting in a queue for two hours. What the rules actually do There is real automation on the Actions tab — it just runs at the other end of the process. Instead of deciding requests for you, the rules stop requests you would have declined from ever being submitted. Tighten the status list and the queue shrinks dramatically — usually more than any approval rule would have saved you, because a request that is never submitted costs nothing at all. Choosing those statuses well is the highest-leverage half hour in the whole setup. Making the review itself fast The remaining work is the queue, and it is built to be worked in batches rather than one email at a time. It sits at WooCommerce → Requests, with a count in the menu of everything waiting on you. Each row carries the request number, the order, the customer, the type, the reason they chose, how long it has been waiting and its current status. Type, age and status all sort, so “oldest pending cancellations” is one click. A routine that works for most stores: Handled this way, a queue of forty is fifteen minutes — and unlike an inbox, it tells you at a glance whether anything is outstanding. A sensible policy, without a rule engine What people are really asking for when they ask about auto-approval is: how do I stop thinking about the easy cases? That is a policy question, and you can answer it without any automation. Start conservative and widen as the history accumulates — which means keeping the history. On the Advanced tab, Keep resolved requests for sets how many days a resolved request survives the daily cleanup, and zero keeps everything. If you intend to review your own decisions, zero or a generous number is the setting you want. If you genuinely need automation Be realistic about what is on offer. The plugin ships filters throughout — the stage map, action availability, tracking detection and invoice sources are the documented ones — but there is no supported hook advertised for deciding requests, and building one means taking on precisely the responsibility the default design was avoiding. The PHP source and test suites are public on GitHub if you want to judge that for yourself. And a refund still will not happen by itself. Where to go next The queue only gets busy if requests are getting through, so start upstream: setting the cancellation rules first, then handling the spike during a flash sale. If you fulfil through a supplier, returns as a dropshipper covers the extra handoff that makes fast approvals harder.