Send Again (beta): let customers easily repeat a previous bulk order

Beta feature

Send Again is in beta. Settings and plan availability may change. Contact us if you have questions or feedback about the functionality.

Today we're releasing the initial beta of Send Again, a new feature that lets customers repeat a previous bulk order from their Shopify customer account.

Your best gifting customers already have a list. They sent 80 holiday gifts last year, or a welcome kit to every new account each quarter, and the hardest part of doing it again is finding that spreadsheet. Send Again turns those existing gift givers into repeat customers by making the next round a few clicks: open last year's Send, click Send again, and every recipient, address, gift message, and product lands in the Send To Many cart, ready to review and pay for.

The Send To Many cart is the same storefront checkout you already use, built for customizing gift orders for dozens or even 100 recipients: per-recipient products, addresses, gift messages, and shipping dates, with totals that update as the gifter edits. Send Again gives it a head start.

In future releases we'll be adding ways to create a new Send from a list of customers, even if those orders were placed outside of Send To Many, and to build Send Again links you can drop into email and SMS campaigns.

How to use it

For this release, send a link to customers who have prior Sends. Link them either to the Sends page in their customer account or to the Send details for a particular Send. From there, they click Send again. Future releases will provide more ways for customers to initiate a Send Again.

What this version handles

For brands that used Send To Many last year, Send Again links customers to their previous Sends in their Shopify customer account. They pick a Send, and we push all the recipients, card messages, and products into the cart.

Each recipient card carries over:

• Name, company, email, and phone
• Shipping address, using the validated address from the original Send
• Products, variants, and quantities assigned to that recipient
• Gift message and any other order notes or attributes

From there the gifter can add or remove recipients, change products, update addresses, pick shipping dates, apply a discount code, and check out.

It also handles the cases where last year's order can't be repeated exactly:

• Products that are out of stock or no longer available. If a product has been deleted, unpublished, sold out, or its variant no longer exists, we leave it off the recipient and show a message listing what couldn't be preloaded. The gifter picks a replacement from the cart.
• Collection mode. Point Send Again at a collection page (such as /collections/holiday) where the checkout block is installed, and we load the recipients and addresses but not the products. The gifter sees a featured collection of this year's gifts and chooses new products for the group instead of repeating last year's.

Send Again reloads the recipient list, not the completed order. Shipping rates and delivery dates are selected fresh, and totals, tax, and discounts are recalculated at current prices. Discount codes from the original Send are not reapplied.

Requirements

• A monthly or annual paid plan. Send Again may be restricted to certain plans once it leaves beta.
• Shopify's new customer accounts, with the Sends page extension enabled. The button lives on the Send detail view.
• Multi-recipient checkout installed on a page in your theme.
• The customer is logged in to the account that placed the original Send, and the Send is finished (orders generated). If they open a Send Again link while logged out, we prompt them to log in first.

Send Again works for Sends that started as a storefront checkout, a spreadsheet upload in the app, or an inquiry, as long as the Send is associated with the customer's account email.

Turn it on

In Send To Many, go to Settings > Customer account, check Enable send again, and enter the relative path of the page where your multi-recipient checkout is installed (for example, /pages/send-to-many-cart). If you already have a checkout block installed, we pre-fill this field. Click Save. The button appears on finished Sends in customer accounts immediately, with nothing to add in the theme editor.

Things to know

• The customer has to log in to their store account. Since personally identifiable information (PII) is involved, our assumption is that this feature needs to direct customers through their store account login.
• Send Again does not copy or modify the original Send. It creates a new checkout session, and checking out creates a new Send with its own aggregate and recipient orders.
• Recipient addresses come through as already validated, so the gifter isn't asked to re-confirm addresses that were correct last time. Addresses they edit are validated again.
• Inventory is checked when the checkout loads. Sold-out variants are disabled in the product picker with a sold out label, the same as any other multi-recipient checkout session, and we display a message that one or more products couldn't be preloaded because they're out of stock.
• If you use multiple checkout configurations, Send Again uses whichever configuration is installed on the page URL you set.

Related: Delivery digest emails (beta), the other beta feature for keeping repeat gifters informed.