Playbook, online store
The reset was sent. That is the whole of what anybody here knows
Somebody is trying to get into an account to look at a parcel, the reset email has not turned up, and they are now certain the site is broken. It is usually delivered and filtered, or expired, or sent to an address one letter out from the one they typed. None of that is visible to the shop, and pretending otherwise is how this ends with a promise nobody can keep.
Why this is not the general answer
The handling pattern for password resets holds across every trade. What follows is the part that does not.
- A reset is transactional mail sent from the same domain as the shop's marketing, so a customer who once moved a promotional message to junk has trained their own mailbox to hide the very email they are now waiting for.
- Reset links expire, and somebody who requests three in quick succession and then opens the first one gets an error that reads as a broken site rather than as an expired link, which is why these arrive so indignant.
- Shops deliberately return the same confirmation whether or not the address has an account, which is correct behaviour and also exactly why the customer cannot tell they have typed an address they do not own.
- None of this touches the order, and that is the sentence to lead with, because the person is almost always trying to get in to check a parcel rather than to change a password.
How it arrives
- i never got the reset email
- the reset link says it has expired
- i keep asking for a password reset and nothing comes
- how long does the reset link last
- can you just reset my password for me
- i changed my email and now i cant reset it
What has to be indexed for this to work
| The exact sender address and subject line of the reset mail | Written out verbatim so a customer can search their mailbox for it rather than scroll. This is the single most effective line in the whole document, because the message is usually sitting in a filtered folder and nobody knows what they are looking for. |
|---|---|
| How long a link is valid and what a new request does to an old one | The expiry in plain terms, and whether requesting another invalidates the previous link. That second rule is the cause of the expired link error and it is never published anywhere a customer would look. |
| The order to check things in | Junk, promotions and any filtered folder first, then the alternative email addresses the person might have used, then contact. Written as a sequence, because an unordered list of suggestions gets read as excuses rather than as steps. |
| What the shop can see about a sent reset, which is very little | State it plainly so the assistant can say it as a fact about the shop. It also protects the team from being asked to confirm a delivery nobody can confirm, which is a promise that comes back around. |
The reply
First, nothing about this affects an order: parcels ship and refunds return whether or not you can sign in. On the email itself, it comes from the sender address listed on our help page with a fixed subject line, so searching your mailbox for that subject usually finds it in a junk or promotions folder [1]. If it says the link has expired, that is often because a newer request cancels the older link, so use the most recent email rather than the first one [2]. Worth trying the other address you might have used as well, since we return the same confirmation message whether or not an address has an account, which means a typo looks identical to success. I cannot send or reset anything myself, so if none of that works, leave your name and the address and somebody will pick it up.
The order reassurance goes first because it is what the person is actually worried about and it lowers the temperature of everything after it. The searchable subject line is the highest yield instruction and comes before any theory. The identical confirmation behaviour is explained rather than defended, so it reads as a design decision instead of as the site being unhelpful, and the limit is stated at the end where it no longer sounds like a refusal to help.
Where it stops
The trigger. The visitor has worked through the published steps without success, or no longer has access to the email address the account sits under.
I cannot trigger a reset or see whether one arrived. Leave your name and the email address on the account, and say what you have already tried, and somebody who can look at it will take it from there.
It stops answering before it guesses, says who will pick it up, and asks for the one thing that makes a reply possible. Nothing about it reads as a dead end.
Never say this here
Out of bounds
- Never say whether an address has an account attached to it, since returning the same answer either way is the point of how the reset is built.
- Never ask for a password, an existing one or a chosen new one, and never accept one that gets typed into the message field anyway.
- Never offer to send, resend or trigger a reset, or to set a password on somebody's behalf, none of which the assistant can do in any configuration.
- Never claim the reset email was delivered, because delivery is not something anybody at the shop can see and the customer will quote it back when it still has not arrived.
Questions
- Can it trigger a password reset for somebody?
- No. It reads material and collects an enquiry, and that is the whole of it. What it can do is give the sender address and subject line to search for, which resolves most of these before anybody needs to be involved.
- Why not just tell people whether their address is registered?
- Because the same answer for every address is what stops somebody testing a list of emails against your shop to see which ones are customers. It is mildly inconvenient for the person who mistyped and worth keeping anyway.
- Is this worth writing up at all for a shop?
- It is small volume and it is unusually cheap to close. Four facts, one page: the sender, the subject, the expiry, and the order in which to check. It also carries the reassurance that a locked account does not hold up a parcel, which is the reason most of them are writing.
Keep reading
- Everything for a online storeDelivery cut-offs, the returns window and restock questions get asked before purchase. The one thing an assistant cannot do is find an order.
- Handling password resets in generalAn assistant cannot reset anything. It can walk somebody through your real flow and name the step that usually breaks.
- Cut-offs, zones and duties: three questions wearing one set of wordsCut-off times, zone pricing and who pays the customs bill. What a shop can state as a fact, and where a fact turns into a promise.
- Answering an order status question with no order system attachedThe one question a hosted assistant cannot answer. How to say so and still move the customer forward instead of stalling them.
- The five things a returns answer has to containWindow, start date, postage, condition and exclusions. Five facts hide in one question, and a reply missing any of them gets asked again.
Try it on your own material
Upload a document or point it at your site, paste one line of HTML, then ask it something only your business could answer.