To send a handwritten thank-you card for every Shopify order, connect your store to MailMyCard once. When an order is paid, a real pen writes the card you saved, with the customer's first name, and it goes by tracked post to the order's shipping address. You never export or upload a list. Below: setup, wording, which orders get one, cost and privacy.
Two things to know first. MailMyCard is in private preview, so signing up needs an invite. And it is not in the Shopify App Store yet: you connect your store from the MailMyCard dashboard, as described below.
What happens when a Shopify order is paid?
Shopify tells MailMyCard the moment the order is paid. We read the name and address on the order, put the customer's first name into your saved card, and send it to the pen. The card and its envelope are written in ink in Bangalore, India, and posted with tracking. The card then appears under Your cards in your dashboard, like any other.
A few rules hold for every order:
- One card per order. If Shopify sends the same order twice, it still makes one card.
- Test orders are skipped. Orders Shopify marks as tests never make a card.
- The shipping address is used. If an order has no shipping address, the billing address is used instead.
- Every card is tracked. It goes by the tracked or express service saved in your template, or the one the destination offers.
How do you connect Shopify to MailMyCard?
Save a card as a template, then connect the store from the Integrations page. You type your store's address, choose the card, press Connect Shopify and approve MailMyCard on Shopify's own screen. Nothing to paste: the webhook that tells us about paid orders is registered on your store for you.
Step by step:
- Write the card. In your MailMyCard dashboard, write the card you want every customer to get. On the review step, choose Save this card as a template. Integrations can only send a saved template.
- Open Integrations. It is in the account menu.
- Pick Shopify. Under Add an integration, press Connect on the Shopify tile.
- Fill in two fields. Store address is your store's myshopify.com address (for example
my-store.myshopify.com). Template is the card each paid order sends. - Press Connect Shopify. Shopify asks you to approve MailMyCard for the store. The only permission it asks for is reading orders.
- Check it is connected. Back on Integrations, a note says every paid order now sends your card to its shipping address. The store is listed under Your integrations as "Shopify (connected)", with how many orders came in and how many cards went out.
Prefer to set the webhook up yourself? Integrations has a closed section called Advanced: webhooks. Choose the Shopify (manual) kind, paste your store's webhook signing secret, and press Create webhook. Then, in Shopify admin, go to Settings, Notifications, Webhooks, and create a webhook for Order payment, format JSON, pointing at the URL MailMyCard shows you.
To stop, press Remove next to the store under Your integrations. It asks you to confirm first.
What can the card say?
The card says what you saved in the template, the same words on every order. One blank is filled for each customer: write [Name] where the first name goes, and it is taken from the name on the order's address. Product names, order numbers and prices are not filled in, so write a message that fits any order.
Four notes that work on any order:
Hi [Name], thank you for your order. We packed it by hand this week, and we hope it is already in use. Noor
Dear [Name], thank you for shopping with a small studio. If anything is not right, reply to our email and we will fix it. Tom and Sasha
Hi [Name], thank you for choosing us over the big shops. It keeps four people in work, and we do not forget it. Meera
Dear [Name], whether you bought this for yourself or someone bought it for you, thank you from all of us. Eli
Three things to watch:
- Only [Name] is filled. Any other blank in brackets, like [Product], makes the order fail with the reason shown on Integrations. We never post a card that still says "[Product]".
- Gift orders go to the gift. The card goes to the shipping address, so if someone sent the parcel as a present, the person who opens it gets the card. The last note above reads well either way.
- Leave out order numbers and discount codes. The field experiment in the research section found that adding a giveaway or a discount weakened what the note did.
Our ecommerce thank-you card guide has 23 more notes for first orders, repeat buyers and late deliveries.
Which Shopify orders get a card?
Every paid order with a full address, once. Test orders are skipped, a repeated order still makes one card, and an order with no complete address gets no card. There is no filter for order value, product or tag in the dashboard today. If you connect the store, every paid order sends the card.
If you only want cards for some orders, such as first orders or large ones, there are two other routes. Export those orders from Shopify and use Send to a list on your template, which takes a spreadsheet. Or have a developer call our API with the orders you choose; the developer docs show how.
Do thank-you cards bring Shopify customers back?
The best field evidence says yes, for customers who already like you. In a randomised experiment with an online retailer, customers who got a handwritten note went on to spend about twice as much as those who got none. The effect faded when the note came with a gift or a discount, and it showed among loyal customers, not among the rest.
That study is Kim, Choi and Kim's, published in the Journal of Interactive Marketing in 2022. The authors found "a positive and significant effect on customer spending", and that "warmth underlies the key findings" (Yonsei University). Science Says, which summarised the paper, reports 1,232 customers of a South Korean online shop: those who got a copy of a handwritten note spent $52.07, against $25.97 with no note (Science Says).
The time after checkout is when that warmth counts. Narvar's survey of 3,461 US online shoppers found that two-thirds feel a surge of anxiety after clicking "buy", and 74 per cent had a late delivery in the past year. When something goes wrong, 46 per cent most want acknowledgement (Narvar).
Keeping a customer is cheaper than finding one. Acquiring a new customer costs five to 25 times more than keeping one, and a 5 per cent rise in retention lifts profits by 25 to 95 per cent, according to Bain research quoted in Harvard Business Review (HBR). And post works alongside email: Royal Mail MarketReach found campaigns including mail were 27 per cent more likely to deliver top-ranking sales (MarketReach).
Measure it in your own store. Note your second-order rate for the month before you connect, then compare it with the months after.
How do you control what the cards cost?
Cards are paid from a prepaid MailMyCard wallet, so the integration can never spend more than you put in. Each paid order takes one card's price plus tracked delivery to its country. If the wallet runs too low, that order gets no card and the reason is shown on Integrations. It is not retried later; the next paid order is judged afresh.
- Watch the counts. Under Your integrations, each store shows orders received, cards sent and the last problem, if any.
- Top up before a sale. A busy weekend can empty a small balance. Orders that arrive while it is empty get no card.
- Refunds in Shopify do not cancel a card. A card is placed when the order is paid. If you refund the order an hour later, the card is already on its way to the pen.
- Volume pricing for stores sending hundreds of cards a month is on our For business page.
What customer data does MailMyCard use?
Only the name and address on the order, to write and post the card. MailMyCard asks Shopify for one permission, reading orders, and does not keep the customer's email, phone number or Shopify customer id. Shopify counts names and addresses as protected customer data, which apps must keep to the minimum they need.
Shopify's own rules say an app must "process only the minimum personal data required" and encrypt data at rest and in transit (Shopify). The token that lets MailMyCard read your store's orders is stored encrypted.
Shopify also requires public apps to answer three privacy requests (Shopify). MailMyCard handles each one:
- A customer asks to see their data. We gather every card made from their orders (name, address, message, status, dates and tracking) and send it to the store owner within the 30 days Shopify allows.
- A customer asks to be deleted. Their name and address are erased from every card. A card still being written keeps its address until it is posted, then it is erased. The amount paid, the destination country and the tracking number stay as the accounting record.
- The store uninstalls the app. The connection stops at once. 48 hours later, when Shopify sends its shop deletion request, every card's recipient is erased the same way and the store's connection is deleted.
What about WooCommerce, Stripe or a CRM?
WooCommerce connects the same way, from the WooCommerce tile on Integrations, with no plugin to install. Stripe sends a card for every successful payment with a shipping address. If your customers live in a CRM instead, see how to send handwritten cards from HubSpot, which also covers Pipedrive, Zoho CRM, Attio, monday.com, Keap and Close. For the card inside the parcel, our small business thank-you guide has wording.
Sources
- Kim, S., Choi, J. and Kim, S. H. (2022), "Do Handwritten Notes Benefit Online Retailers? A Field Experiment", Journal of Interactive Marketing 57(4): yonsei.elsevierpure.com
- Science Says, "Handwritten thank you notes increase sales" (summary of Kim et al.): app.sciencesays.com
- Narvar, State of Post-Purchase 2025 press release: corp.narvar.com
- Gallo, A. (2014), "The Value of Keeping the Right Customers", Harvard Business Review: hbr.org
- Royal Mail MarketReach, The Private Life of Mail: marketreach.co.uk
- Shopify, "Protected customer data": shopify.dev
- Shopify, "Privacy law compliance": shopify.dev
