Klaviyo Order Confirmation Email Setup

To send order confirmations from Klaviyo, build a flow on the Placed Order metric, disable Shopify's native order confirmation so customers do not get both, and send it as a transactional message so it reaches people who are not marketing subscribers. The setup takes an afternoon. The decision about whether to do it at all deserves more thought than that.

Decide whether to move it before you build anything

Shopify's native order confirmation works. It is reliable, it sends from infrastructure you do not have to think about, and it reaches every buyer regardless of marketing consent. Moving it to Klaviyo buys you three things: design control, dynamic content driven by the customer's full profile rather than just the order, and the ability to put a recommendation or a review prompt inside an email with an unusually high open rate.

It also costs you three things. You take on the deliverability of your own transactional mail. You introduce a consent question that did not exist before. And you add a failure mode, because a flow can be paused, filtered or misconfigured in ways a platform notification cannot.

The honest rule: move it if you have a reason to change the content. Do not move it because a checklist said to. If the only change you plan is a nicer header, the native notification is doing that job at zero operational risk.

Where it does earn the move, the attention is real. Omnisend's 2026 Ecommerce Marketing Report, covering 27 billion emails from 150,000 brands sent during 2025, found order confirmation emails averaged a 53.99 percent open rate, a 1.10 percent conversion rate and 1.60 dollars per send, against 0.18 dollars for a scheduled campaign. That is roughly nine times the revenue per send of a promotional email.

The build, step by step

Create a flow triggered on Placed Order. Use Placed Order rather than Fulfilled Order or Checkout Started: it fires at payment and is the event Shopify's own notification uses, so the timing matches what customers expect.

Set the flow to send with no delay. A confirmation that arrives twenty minutes late generates support tickets.

Mark the message as transactional in Klaviyo's message settings. This is the step people miss, and it matters: without it, the email only reaches profiles with marketing consent, which means a portion of your buyers get no confirmation at all. Transactional sending exists precisely for this, and an order confirmation is the textbook case for it.

Then disable Shopify's order confirmation notification. Do this in the same session as switching the Klaviyo flow live, not before and not after. Before, and buyers get nothing. After, and they get two.

Add the suppression you will otherwise regret: exclude test orders, exclude orders flagged for fraud review, and exclude zero-value orders if you issue replacements as no-charge orders.

Finally, send yourself a real order. Not a preview. Place a live test order, confirm the email arrives, confirm the order details render, and confirm you did not receive the Shopify version as well. Previews do not catch a native notification you forgot to turn off.

Transactional does not mean exempt

Marking a message transactional in Klaviyo changes who receives it. It does not exempt you from the sender rules that govern your domain.

Order confirmations are genuinely transactional, so Gmail's one-click unsubscribe requirement does not apply to them: Google's own guidance is that "one-click unsubscribe is required only for marketing and promotional messages". That is the correct reading and it is worth knowing, because a lot of teams add unsubscribe headers to receipts out of caution and then wonder why buyers are opting out of everything.

What does still apply is authentication and complaint rate. Google requires SPF or DKIM for all senders, SPF and DKIM plus a DMARC record for senders of more than 5,000 messages a day to personal Gmail accounts, and spam rates in Postmaster Tools kept below 0.3 percent. Since November 2025, Google's stated position is that messages failing these requirements "will experience disruptions, including temporary and permanent rejections" rather than simply being filtered.

The practical risk when you move receipts into your marketing platform is that a marketing complaint problem now threatens your receipts. If your promotional sending pushes the domain's complaint rate up, the order confirmations sharing that domain are affected too. Klaviyo's own healthy threshold for spam complaints is stricter than Google's ceiling, at below 0.01 percent.

The mitigation is not complicated: keep list hygiene tight on the marketing side, and if you are sending at real volume consider whether transactional mail belongs on a separate subdomain from campaigns. That is a decision to make deliberately rather than discover during a deliverability incident.

The email you should be fixing instead

Here is the finding that changes where to spend the afternoon. In the same Omnisend dataset, shipping confirmation emails averaged a 62.99 percent open rate and 2.86 dollars per send, against the order confirmation's 53.99 percent and 1.60 dollars.

The shipping confirmation is the better email on both measures, and almost every brand treats it as a pure logistics notification while lavishing design attention on the order confirmation. The reason is straightforward: at the point of order confirmation the customer has just decided and has nothing left to do. At the point of dispatch they are anticipating, which is a better state for a recommendation or a review-programme prompt to land in.

So build both flows, and put the secondary content in the shipping confirmation first. One block, referencing the product they bought.

Be aware of what Klaviyo does not publish here. Klaviyo has no order-confirmation-specific engagement benchmark: its flow benchmark documentation covers abandoned cart, post-purchase and welcome series only, and its industry benchmarks break out campaigns against flows rather than individual flow types. Klaviyo's blog states qualitatively that "more than half of your customers will open order confirmation emails" without attaching a figure. Any specific Klaviyo order-confirmation percentage you find quoted elsewhere is not something Klaviyo publishes.

Four failure modes to check a week after the migration

Both emails sending. The most common one, and it usually means the Shopify notification was disabled in a different store location or channel than the one taking orders. Place a live order through every sales channel you run, not just the main storefront.

Buyers without marketing consent getting nothing. This is the transactional flag not being set, and it is invisible in your metrics because those profiles simply do not appear in the send. Check the flow's skipped-recipient count rather than its delivered count.

Order details rendering empty on some orders. Usually a variant, bundle or subscription line item your template does not handle. Test with a bundle and a subscription order specifically, since those are the two that break templates.

Receipts landing in promotions. Moving transactional mail onto the domain and template you use for campaigns can shift how mailbox providers categorise it. If buyers start reporting missing confirmations, that is the cause, and the fix is a separate sending subdomain rather than a template change.

Put all four on a one-week check, then again after your next promotional peak, because the fourth one tends to appear under volume rather than immediately.

What to put in it, and what to leave out

The order details come first, above anything promotional. This is the information the customer opened the email to see, and burying it under a hero image is the most common design mistake in the category.

One secondary block, and one only. A review prompt for a previous order, a single cross-sell tied to the item purchased, or a link to whatever the customer most often needs next. Not a carousel.

Leave out the discount code. A code in the order confirmation reaches a customer who has just paid full price and teaches them to wait next time. If you want to incentivise the second order, that belongs later in the post-purchase sequence, after the product has been used.

Leave out the survey. Asking for feedback before delivery produces answers about your checkout, which is not what most brands are trying to learn.

What does belong, where you have it, is the delivery-tracking link. It is the single most clicked element in any confirmation email, and putting it in your own email rather than making the customer find the carrier's page keeps that click on your domain. If tracking drives enough of your support volume, that one change pays for the migration on its own.

If you also run post-purchase SMS, decide which channel owns the dispatch notification before both go live. Sending it twice is the most common cross-channel duplicate in ecommerce, and it is the one customers complain about, so the SMS programme and this flow need one shared rule.

Our retention email programmes team runs the migration and the deliverability check as one job, because the second is what makes the first safe.

In-body table: Order confirmation against shipping confirmation, 2025 Omnisend data