WoodMart Review Reminder emails

Hello,
I am using the WoodMart Review Reminder feature (Theme Settings → Single Product → Reviews → Review Reminder).

The feature is enabled and set to send reminders 7 days after an order is marked as Completed.

What is confusing is that one customer definitely received the review reminder email and replied to it, but many other customers never received any reminder email, including test orders placed by myself.

Could you please clarify:

1. Does the Review Reminder feature require an SMTP solution (such as WP Mail SMTP) or any other plugin/service to ensure reliable email delivery?
2. Does it rely on WordPress Cron or Action Scheduler?
3. Is there any log where I can verify whether reminder emails were generated and sent?
4. Are there any known conditions that would prevent reminder emails from being sent to some completed orders?

This feature is extremely important for our business, as we are a new online pet shop and customer reviews are one of the most valuable assets we can build. Because of that, it is very important for us to ensure that review reminder emails are sent reliably to all eligible customers.

Thank you for your help.

Best regards,

Dejan Malbasic
Granule.rs

Attachments:

You must be logged in to view attached files.

Hello Dejan,

Thank you for the detailed report and for sharing the context about your business. Let me answer your questions one by one based on how the feature is implemented.

1. Does the Review Reminder require an SMTP plugin?

The reminder email is sent through WooCommerce’s own transactional email system (WC_Emails). This means it uses whatever mail-sending method WordPress currently has configured — by default, the built-in wp_mail() function and PHP’s mail().

On most shared hosting environments, PHP mail() is unreliable: emails are frequently lost, delayed, or marked as spam with no error reported back to WordPress. We strongly recommend installing an SMTP plugin (WP Mail SMTP, FluentSMTP, or similar) and connecting it to a transactional email service (SendGrid, Mailgun, Amazon SES, Postmark, etc.). This is the single most common reason why some customers receive emails and others do not — the infrastructure beneath WordPress is silently dropping them.

2. Does it rely on WordPress Cron or Action Scheduler?

It uses WordPress Cron (WP-Cron), not Action Scheduler.

Here is how the flow works:

1. When an order transitions to Completed status, the woocommerce_order_status_completed hook fires and the reminder is scheduled — the order data is stored in the woodmart_review_reminder_data option with a scheduled_date (current time + your configured delay).
2. A recurring WP-Cron event woodmart_review_reminder_cron runs hourly. Each time it fires, it checks all pending reminders and sends any whose scheduled_date has passed.

Important WP-Cron caveat: WP-Cron is not a real scheduler. It only runs when someone visits your site. On low-traffic sites, the hourly event may not fire at exactly the right time. If the site receives very little traffic, reminders may be delayed or — in extreme cases — missed. The standard fix is to disable WP-Cron’s pseudo-cron mode and set up a real system cron job that hits wp-cron.php every minute or every hour. Your hosting provider can help with this, or it can be configured via WP-CLI.

Additionally, the cron event processes a maximum of 20 reminders per run (filterable via woodmart_review_reminder_send_emails_limited). For high-order-volume shops this is worth knowing, but it is unlikely to be the issue here.

3. Is there a log to verify whether emails were generated and sent?

There is no dedicated log built into the feature, but you can check the following:

– Per-order meta fields: In WooCommerce → Orders → (open the order) → look at the order meta. The theme stores:
– _wd_review_reminder_scheduled_date — timestamp of when the reminder is scheduled to be senoved after sending).
– _wd_review_reminder_sent — timestamp of when the email was actually sent (set after delivery attempt).
– _wd_review_reminder_token — hashed unsubscribe token (present until the email is sent).

To see these fields, install a plugin like Advanced Order Export or WooCommerce Order Meta viewer, or check directly via WP-CLI: wp post meta get <order_id> _wd_review_reminder_sent.

– WooCommerce email log: If you install WooCommerce Email Log or a similar plugin that hooks into wp_mail, it will capture all outgoing emails including review reminders.
– SMTP plugin logs: Most SMTP plugins (WP Mail SMTP, FluentSMTP) keep a log of sent and failedtionable log for diagnosing delivery failures.

4. Are there known conditions that prevent reminder emails from being sent to some completed o

Yes. The code checks several conditions and silently skips the reminder if any of them are true:

At the time the order is marked Completed (scheduling stage):
– The customer’s email is on the unsubscribe list for this email type.
– A reminder for this order ID already exists in the queue (duplicate prevention).
– All products in the order are skipped — this happens when:
– Reviews are disabled on the product (comments are closed).
– The customer already left a review for that product using the same email address.

Please let us know if you need clarification on any of these steps, and thank you for the kind words about what you are building.

Best regards

Hello,
Thank you for the detailed explanation.

Based on the behavior I am seeing, one customer definitely received and replied to a review reminder email, while several other customers (including my own test orders) never received any reminder.

In your experience, does this pattern point more towards an email delivery issue (for example, using the default WordPress/PHP mail system without SMTP), or towards a WP-Cron scheduling issue?

Would you expect installing and properly configuring WP Mail SMTP (or another SMTP solution) to resolve this problem in most cases?

Also, if you had to recommend the first thing to check or fix in this situation, would it be SMTP delivery or WP-Cron configuration?

Best regards,

Dejan Malbasic
Granule.rs

Hello,

Thank you for the detailed explanation.

Based on what I described, one customer definitely received and replied to a review reminder email, while several other customers (including my own completed test orders) never received any reminder.

In your opinion, based on your experience with other WoodMart stores, does this behavior sound more like an email delivery issue (using the default WordPress/PHP mail system without SMTP), or more like a WP-Cron scheduling issue?

If you were managing this store yourself, would the first step be to install and properly configure an SMTP solution such as WP Mail SMTP, or would you investigate WP-Cron first?

Thank you again for your help.

Best regards,

Dejan Malbasic
Granule.rs

Now that I have successfully installed and configured ‘WP Mail SMTP’, is there a way to manually trigger a review reminder email for a specific order for testing purposes? Thank you

[Author]

Posts