Does HikaShop immediately generate emails?

Perhaps a daft sounding question but does HikaShop immediately generate emails on the customer completing their purchase? I am still considering what shopping cart to use for a friend's Chinese Takeaway and he's not going to have access to the server. In his business he'll just have a computer terminal running Ms Outlook which I will set-up to automatically print emails aka customer orders (using www.sperrysoftware.com/outlook/auto-print.asp ).

Hi there,

Theoretically it depends of the time taken by the payment method to proceed. However, this time is usually super short and Hikashop generate the email automatically once the order is completed.
You can test it by yourself on a demo website, email is send directly after order confirmation.

I ran a test purchase today and found that the system generated the order confirmation email before I had completed the PayPal payment. I cancelled out of the PayPal payment and returned to the shop (yes, customers change their minds!) but, if the purchase/cancellation had been for real, I would have had to contact the shop admin to make sure they knew the order had been cancelled, as I only received the order confirmation and nothing regarding the cancellation.

Two emails are sent by HikaShop:

The order CREATION notification when the order is created.
The order CONFIRMATION notification when the order has been paid.

You only received the first email, not the second one.

If you don't want the first one and that you're using the Business edition, you can unpublish the order creation notification email via the menu System->Emails.