Branding

“Your brand” in “Settings”, the “Brand” group, is where the emails your customers receive stop looking like Horizon’s and start looking like your store’s.

Your customers are your customers. An email that arrives from a platform they have never heard of gets deleted, or gets a support ticket sent to you asking who we are. With your brand set, every email about their parcel carries your name, your logo and your colour, comes from your name and sends replies to your team.

Which emails carry your brand, and which never do

Your brand goes on every email your customers get about their order:

• the event emails on “Customer emails”: “On its way”, out for delivery, delivered and delivery exceptions;
• the emails your flows send, and an update sent by hand from a parcel;
• the returns emails: request received, approved, declined, received, completed, the return label and store credit.

It never goes on the emails we send you. Your label confirmation (the email with the label attached and what it cost) stays ours and goes only to you: a customer never receives it. Account emails, invoices and alerts are ours too.

When the page knows no name and no logo for your store at all, customer emails keep our own look. As soon as it knows either, they are yours.

Your brand in customer emails

The “Your brand in customer emails” card holds three things.

“Store name” is shown at the top of every email when there is no logo, in the sign-off (“The Northwind team”, after the tracking button), and in place of the logo when the reader’s email app blocks images. A logo too narrow to hold the whole name (a square mark, a long name) gets the name typed beside it, so a reader with images blocked still reads all of it. Leave it empty and the email uses your company name from the account settings, or, without one, the name of your first connected store. The field’s hint says which one is in use.

“Logo” is either “Upload a file” or “Use an image link”:

• an uploaded logo must be a PNG or a JPG, 2 MB or smaller and at least 200 pixels wide. A transparent background works best. We check the file, turn it upright, remove its hidden metadata (such as the place a phone photo was taken) and fit it into a box of 600 by 200 pixels without ever enlarging it. It saves on its own the moment you pick it: the status line under it says so, and there is nothing else to press. “Remove” asks once before it takes the logo out of emails;
• an image link must start with https://. We never download it: your customers’ email app loads it from your site, so it must stay there.

An uploaded logo wins over a link while it is there.

SVG files are refused on purpose: most email apps do not show them, so the logo would silently disappear from every email.

“Brand colour” is the colour of the button in every email. Pick it or type its code (such as #0B7A75). We choose white or black for the button text, whichever is easier to read, so the button always meets the accessibility contrast for text; the line under the field shows which and the contrast it reaches. A very light colour is flagged: the button stays readable, but links in the email then use a darker blue. “Use the default” goes back to our dark ink.

Sender

“From name” is the name your customers see as the sender. Emails still go out from our verified sending address, shown under the field; only the name is yours. That keeps them out of spam folders: an email that claims to come from your own domain without being sent by it is exactly what mail providers block. Leave it empty and the store name is used.

“Reply-to address” is where your customers’ replies go. Without one, a reply goes to our sending address, which nobody reads. Set it.

Customer email footer

“Footer text” is a line at the bottom of every customer email, such as your address or opening hours. Leave it empty and the email ends with “Sent by” and your store name.

Tracking link and documents

“Custom tracking URL” is your own tracking page. Customer emails link to it, with the tracking number added, when it starts with https://. Without one, the button goes to the carrier’s own tracking page; if we cannot build that page for the carrier, the email has no button rather than a web search.

“Footer on packing slips and your label confirmations” is printed on packing slips and added to the label confirmation we email you. It is not shown to customers.

See it before you save it

“Live preview”, beside the form (under it on a phone), shows the real email as your customers will get it, with the values you have typed but not saved yet, and with your latest parcel when you have one. Choose the email to look at and the language. “Images blocked” shows it the way most email apps first open it, before the reader allows images: this is why the store name also appears in type.

“Send me a test” emails exactly what the preview shows to you, and only to you: the address of the person signed in. Its subject starts with [Test].

Text changes are kept with “Save Changes” at the bottom of the page, like the rest of Settings. A value that would break an email, such as a reply-to that is not one address or a logo link that is not secure, is flagged under its field and not saved.

Only the account owner and admins can change the branding or send tests.

What it does not cover

The app’s own appearance for your team is not branding. Light and dark are a per-browser choice, covered in Light and dark.

The look of your Digital Product Passport pages is set in the theme view of “Digital Passports”, not here, because a passport is a public product page rather than an email. See Digital Product Passports.

The returns portal your customers use is configured from “Returns”. See The returns portal your customers use.

Both are one click away: the “Your brand also shows here” card at the foot of the section has “Returns portal look”, which opens the portal view of “Returns”, and “Passport page look”, which opens the theme view of “Digital Passports”.

A practical order of work

Set your brand before you turn customer-facing emails on, not after. Otherwise the first batch goes out unbranded, and those are the ones your customers open. Then send yourself a test of each email from Notifications.