Notifications and email preferences

Without the add-on

With the add-on

What this add-on does

A marketplace sends a lot of email, and almost all of it goes to somebody who never joined a mailing list — they just bought or sold something. Send too much and people stop reading you; send marketing without a working opt-out and you have a compliance problem. Three connected parts:

• A notification bell. An in-app feed at /notifications/, so an event need not become an email to be noticed.
• An email preference centre. Four categories a member can switch off, plus a one-click unsubscribe that needs no login.
• An email log. Every email the site sends, searchable.

The middle one is the reason to own it. Logging email is a solved problem with free options. A marketplace-aware preference centre that the rest of your add-ons ask before they send is not.

The notification bell

A plain, server-rendered page showing a member's 50 most recent notifications, newest first, each with an unread dot, a relative time and a link through. There is a “Mark all as read” control, and it works without JavaScript.

What raises a notification

The add-on listens for events the other add-ons already announce. Four kinds:

• New message — from Messaging & Offers, to the other party in the thread.
• Issue opened — from Disputes, to the seller.
• New review — from Reviews, to the person reviewed.
• Funds released — from Escrow, linked to the vendor's payments page.

If an add-on is not installed, its event never fires and the listener sits idle. On first run the add-on creates a published Notifications page holding the [bazaarkit_notifications] shortcode, and re-checks it on every load, so a deleted page comes back. Being per-member content, it is never page-cached.

Email preferences, and why transactional email is different

Members manage their own email from the Email preferences section on the WooCommerce My Account dashboard — buyers and sellers share one panel, because on a marketplace most people are both. Four categories, each a toggle:

Everything defaults to on — the UK soft opt-in model: someone who has bought or sold through you may be emailed about similar things, provided every message carries a way out.

The set is not hard-wired — a developer can add a fifth toggle without editing the add-on.

One-click unsubscribe, without a login

An unsubscribe link that first asks somebody to log in is not really an unsubscribe link. So every marketing email carries two: a footer line reading Manage email preferences · Unsubscribe, and a List-Unsubscribe header, which lets a mail client show its own unsubscribe button beside your message. Both switch off exactly one category.

The link carries the member's id, the category and an HMAC signature made with a secret derived from your site's own salts, checked in constant time. It cannot be forged or guessed by walking through user ids, and an invalid link changes nothing.

There is deliberately no expiry: an email dug out of an archive a year later should still opt somebody out. The confirmation page does not load your theme, so it renders the same logged in or out.

“Did that customer actually get their order email?”

This is the question. A buyer says their confirmation never arrived, and there is no way to tell whether the site sent it, the mail service rejected it, or it is in a spam folder.

The email log records when, to whom, the subject, and whether the message was accepted or rejected — covering WooCommerce order mail, WordPress core mail such as password resets, and BazaarKit's own. Read it at WordPress admin → BazaarKit → Email Log: tabs for All, Sent and Failed, plus a search box matching recipient or subject. A non-zero failed count is highlighted, so a store failing to send order email is obvious on load.

Where free alternatives overlap, honestly

Logging sent email is not a scarce feature. WP Mail Logging is free and widely installed, WP Mail SMTP logs on its paid tiers, and WooCommerce is adding its own transactional email logging in version 10.9. If a log is all you need, use one of those — we would rather say so than sell you a duplicate.

How it is built, and its blind spot

The log listens after a message is handed off, so it can never alter, delay or suppress an email. The trade-off: plugins that take over delivery earlier produce no rows at all, so an empty log on a site that is definitely sending email usually means something upstream is handling it. Bodies are never stored, only subjects, and there is no resend button.

How this gates every other add-on's email

Each add-on can send email of its own. Left alone, each would need its own opt-out in its own place. Instead each asks before sending, and this one answers:

1. An add-on is about to send. Messaging is emailing about a new message or an offer; Reviews is sending a review-request reminder.
2. It asks the shared gate. Each publishes a documented point where anything may veto the send.
3. The preference centre answers. Messaging maps to Messages & offers, review reminders to Review requests. Category off, no email.
4. Transactional email is never asked. Order, payout and dispute mail bypasses the gate, so nothing can suppress it by accident.

Take the add-on away and the gate is unhooked. Nothing breaks — opt-outs simply live in several places again.

What UK PECR and GDPR actually ask of you

Owners are told to be “GDPR compliant” without being told what that means for a shop's email. The practical UK picture rests on a single distinction.

Service email is not marketing. An order confirmation, a dispatch notice, a payment receipt, a dispute update, a password reset — these exist because the recipient started something and needs to know how it went. No consent, no unsubscribe link.

Marketing email is the regulated kind. Under the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations it generally needs consent, with the exception usually called the soft opt-in: if you obtained the address during a sale or its negotiation, you may email that person about your own similar products, provided you gave them a simple refusal at the time and in every message since. That is why a marketplace can email members without a signup checkbox — and why the opt-out must be real rather than decorative.

The UK GDPR sits alongside it: withdrawing consent must be as easy as giving it, and an opt-out honoured promptly and kept honoured. Gmail and Yahoo's bulk-sender rules separately expect a one-click unsubscribe in the headers — deliverability rather than law, pointing the same way.

A category-level preference centre satisfies all of that at once, because it puts the line in the right place. Service email stays outside the system; marketing is grouped into a few things a person can recognise and refuse individually. Someone tired of review reminders can stop those without losing their order confirmations.

Your settings, and what they change

Two settings, both about the email log — the bell and the preference centre need none. Find them at WordPress admin → BazaarKit → Settings, under Notifications & Email.

The log is capped by size as well as age, so a runaway sending loop cannot fill your database, and you can empty it by hand from the Email Log screen.

What to change in WordPress and WooCommerce

Nothing is required. No mail service to connect, no API key, no external account — email goes out through WordPress's own mail function, so whatever already delivers your order emails carries on unchanged, and WooCommerce's email settings are untouched. Three things are worth a look:

• Your privacy notice. The log stores recipient addresses and subject lines for as long as you tell it to — personal data held for a new purpose, so the retention setting should match your policy.
• Who can read the log. The screen needs WooCommerce management permission, so shop managers can see who your site has emailed.
• Your existing mail plugin. Keep it — the two coexist, though if it takes over delivery early this log will not see those messages.

How to check it is working

1. Open BazaarKit → Settings and confirm the Notifications & Email section shows real controls rather than a padlock. If padlocked, the add-on needs a licence and switching on from BazaarKit → Add-ons.
2. Visit /notifications/ while logged in, and check Notifications also appears in the My Account menu and the Dokan vendor dashboard.
3. Trigger a real event — a message between two test accounts, or a released payout — and watch a row appear on the recipient's page.
4. Open BazaarKit → Email Log, then use the “Lost password” form. It should show as Sent within seconds.
5. Switch one category off in Email preferences, save, and confirm it stays off after a reload.

The live demo has the whole suite installed if you would rather see it working first.

Troubleshooting

The email log is empty, but the site is definitely sending email

Almost always another plugin is handling delivery in a way this log cannot see — some mail, SMTP and staging plugins take over before WordPress reports a result. Check that plugin's own log. Otherwise logging is off, or nothing has been sent yet.

“I unsubscribed and I am still getting emails”

Check what they are still getting. Order confirmations, payout notices and dispute email are transactional and always send — the most common version of this complaint. If it really is marketing, check which category: switching off Review requests does not stop message notifications.

A member's emails stopped and they did not unsubscribe

The same cause read backwards. A link followed by accident, or a mail client's unsubscribe button, switches off one category with no confirmation. Open their panel and switch it back on.

The Notifications page has gone, or the bell is empty

A deleted page returns on the next front-end load. An empty bell is different: notifications come from the other add-ons' events, so a site running this one alone has nothing raising them.

Frequently asked questions

Where to go next