Email

The module ships four transactional templates and overrides the standard Magento order confirmation email to surface pre-order context. All are wired through etc/email_templates.xml so the four templates can be overridden in admin under Marketing → Communications → Email Templates like any other Magento email.

The four templates

Template ID	When it fires	Recipient
byte8_preorder_email_completion_ready_template	Pre-order marked ready and has an outstanding balance — drained by byte8_preorder_send_ready_notifications cron	Customer
byte8_preorder_email_availability_template	Stock arrives — legacy availability notification (can also be bulk-resent from the admin grid)	Customer
byte8_preorder_email_completion_template	Vault capture or completion order succeeds — pre-order moves to complete	Customer
byte8_preorder_vault_capture_failed_email_template	Vault capture exhausts retries	Customer

Order confirmation enhancements (no template override needed)

When an order contains pre-order items, the standard order_new email is enhanced by layout/template overrides under view/frontend/:

• Orange callout above the items table — "This order contains pre-order items" with the pre-order reference, original total, deposit paid, and Balance Due When Ready.
• Per-item indicator — pre-order line items get a Pre-Order pill below the SKU plus a small panel showing full price / deposit / balance / expected available date.

Non-pre-order orders render the stock confirmation email unchanged. Implementation: view/frontend/layout/sales_email_order_items.xml, templates/email/order/preorder_summary.phtml, templates/email/items/order/default.phtml.

Triggering rules

Completion-ready email — the tokenised flow

Fires from Cron/SendReadyNotifications.php (every minute), draining every pre-order in ready state with an outstanding balance and no successful send yet.

The body contains a tokenised completion link — /preorder/order/complete/preorder_id/{id}/token/{48-char-token} — built against the storefront base URL. A logged-out customer can pay the balance through this link via hash_equals token validation; no account login required. The token is stored on byte8_preorder.completion_token, cleared after successful balance payment.

The cron retries failed sends with attempt-count backoff (capped at 5). Investigate stuck rows with:

SELECT entity_id, increment_id, status, total_remaining_amount,
       ready_notification_attempts, ready_notification_last_error
FROM byte8_preorder
WHERE status = 'ready'
  AND total_remaining_amount > 0
  AND ready_notification_sent_at IS NULL;

Re-running markPreorderReady (admin action, mass action, or CLI) resets the counter and re-queues the row.

See Flag-and-drain cron for the full mechanic.

Availability email

Legacy notification, fires when stock first arrives and updateAvailability runs. The completion-ready email is the recommended channel for partial-deposit pre-orders since it carries the actionable payment link; availability stays for full-payment pre-orders and as a bulk-resend tool from the admin grid (Send Availability Notification mass action).

Completion email

Fires when a pre-order moves to complete, regardless of whether the trigger was vault capture, the tokenised completion order, or the auto-complete cron. Always sent.

Vault capture failed email

Fires only when:

1. Vault capture is enabled in config.
2. The cron retry counter reaches max_attempts.
3. The fallback hasn't already been sent for this pre-order (no double-send if a re-attempt also fails).

The email body links the customer to My pre-orders → Pay balance so they can complete payment manually.

Customising

In admin, go to Marketing → Communications → Email Templates → Add New Template, choose one of the Pre-Order templates as the source, edit, save, and configure it back under Stores → Configuration → Byte8 → Pre-Order → (relevant section) as the active template.

Template variables exposed:

Variable	Available in
{{var preorder.increment_id}}	All four
{{var preorder.total_remaining_amount}}	Completion-ready, availability, vault-failed
{{var preorder.total_paid_amount}}	All four
{{var customer_name}}	All four
{{var completion_url}}	Completion-ready (tokenised, single-use)
{{var formatted_remaining_amount}}	Completion-ready (pre-formatted in the order currency)
{{var order}}	All four (full sales order object)
{{var item_names}} / {{var item_skus}}	Availability
{{var complete_url}}	Vault-failed (customer-account deep link)

Sender / reply-to

All four emails use the standard Magento sales sender by default (Stores → Configuration → Sales → Sales Emails → General Settings). To use a different sender for pre-order specifically, set it under Stores → Configuration → Byte8 → Pre-Order → Email Settings.

Performance note — email is deferred

Mark Ready does not send the completion-ready email inline. The action returns in ~5ms; the cron sends within 60s. This keeps bulk paths fast:

Path	What's synchronous	What's deferred
Per-row Mark Ready in grid / order-view tab	Status flip + token	Email
Mass Mark Ready (N rows)	N status flips	N emails
MSI stock-arrival plugin (M SKUs × K pre-orders each)	M × K status flips	M × K emails
byte8:preorder:scan-stock CLI	Same as above	Same

The drainer caps total email latency at the cron tick (60s) while keeping the trigger path constant-time.

Localisation

The default templates ship with English copy. German translation lives in i18n/de_DE.csv. Add other locales by creating the corresponding CSV file in your store-view's locale directory.

Related

• Cron jobs — the SendReadyNotifications drainer.
• Vault capture — when the failure email fires.
• Mass actions — bulk-resend availability from the admin grid.