Responsive order confirmation emails for mobile de

I've never seen an amazing order confirmation / invoice email. Even the best html5 websites send terrible order confirmation emails (sometimes in plain text). I believe this is because invoice's usually require the use of tables to show the purchased items, which is extremely hard to implement on a mobile devices.

I found some tricks to making tables more manageable on mobiles: http://css-tricks.com/examples/ResponsiveTables/responsive.php, but for an order confirmation email, this approach wouldn't be practical for an invoice table.

Are there any alternatives to making an order confirmation email look good on a mobile devices? and when making an order confirmation email, should you stay away from tables?

回答1:

You can use liquid layout so set all width and to be in percentage. I would also look into grid layouts or column layouts.

So far most big sites like eBay Google and so on still use tables to send out their emails. Tables are are still useful and used widely but with the new css3 like flex, column-count, grids .. tables will probably deprecate in the future.

Again the new CSS3 features are still in testing so not compatible on all browsers.

http://www.w3schools.com/css/css3_multiple_columns.asp
http://www.w3schools.com/cssref/css3_pr_box-flex.asp

回答2:

How about something like this? This uses a fluid/liquid technique that works on all major clients, including those that do not support media queries (Gmail etc...):

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
<html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"><title></title>
  <style type="text/css">
    #outlook a {padding:0;}
    body{width:100% !important; -webkit-text-size-adjust:100%; -ms-text-size-adjust:100%; margin:0; padding:0;} /* force default font sizes */
    .ExternalClass {width:100%;} .ExternalClass, .ExternalClass p, .ExternalClass span, .ExternalClass font, .ExternalClass td, .ExternalClass div {line-height: 100%;} /* Hotmail */
    table td {border-collapse: collapse;}
    @media only screen and (min-width: 600px) { .maxW { width:600px !important; } }
  </style>
</head>
<body style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; -webkit-text-size-adjust:none; -ms-text-size-adjust:none;" leftmargin="0" topmargin="0" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" bgcolor="#FFFFFF"><table bgcolor="#CCCCCC" width="100%" border="0" align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"><tr><td valign="top">
<!--[if (gte mso 9)|(IE)]>
<table width="600" align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" border="0"><tr><td valign="top">
<![endif]-->
<table width="100%" class="maxW" style="max-width: 600px; margin: auto;" border="0" align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"><tr><td valign="top" align="center">


<table width="100%" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" bgcolor="#FFFFFF">
  <tr>
    <td align="left" valign="middle" style="font-family: Verdana, Geneva, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 24px; color: #353535; padding:3%; padding-top:40px; padding-bottom:40px;">
      Invoice
    </td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td align="center">
      <table width="94%" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0">
        <tr>
          <td width="70%" align="left" bgcolor="#252525" style="font-family: Verdana, Geneva, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; color: #EEEEEE; padding:10px; padding-right:0;">
            Item
          </td>
          <td width="30%" align="right" bgcolor="#252525" style="font-family: Verdana, Geneva, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; color: #EEEEEE; padding:10px; padding-left:0;">
            Price
          </td>
        </tr>
        <tr>
          <td width="70%" align="left" bgcolor="#FFFFFF" style="font-family: Verdana, Geneva, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; color: #252525; padding:10px; padding-right:0;">
            Nike Shoes
          </td>
          <td width="30%" align="right" bgcolor="#FFFFFF" style="font-family: Verdana, Geneva, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; color: #252525; padding:10px; padding-left:0;">
            $100
          </td>
        </tr>
        <tr>
          <td width="70%" align="left" bgcolor="#EEEEEE" style="font-family: Verdana, Geneva, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; color: #252525; padding:10px; padding-right:0;">
            Spy Sunglasses
          </td>
          <td width="30%" align="right" bgcolor="#EEEEEE" style="font-family: Verdana, Geneva, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; color: #252525; padding:10px; padding-left:0;">
            $120
          </td>
        </tr>
        <tr>
          <td width="70%" align="left" bgcolor="#FFFFFF" style="font-family: Verdana, Geneva, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; color: #252525; padding:10px; padding-right:0;">
            Buffalo Jeans
          </td>
          <td width="30%" align="right" bgcolor="#FFFFFF" style="font-family: Verdana, Geneva, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; color: #252525; padding:10px; padding-left:0;">
            $80
          </td>
        </tr>
        <tr>
          <td width="70%" align="left" bgcolor="#EEEEEE" style="font-family: Verdana, Geneva, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; color: #252525; padding:10px; padding-right:0;">
            Seiko Watch
          </td>
          <td width="30%" align="right" bgcolor="#EEEEEE" style="font-family: Verdana, Geneva, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; color: #252525; padding:10px; padding-left:0;">
            $260
          </td>
        </tr>
        <tr>
          <td width="70%" align="right" bgcolor="#FFFFFF" style="font-family: Verdana, Geneva, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; color: #252525; padding:10px; padding-left:0;">
            <b>TOTAL</b>
          </td>
          <td width="30%" align="right" bgcolor="#FFFFFF" style="font-family: Verdana, Geneva, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; color: #252525; padding:10px; padding-left:0;">
            <b>$560</b>
          </td>
        </tr>
      </table>
    </td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td align="left" valign="middle" style="font-family: Verdana, Geneva, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; color: #353535; padding:3%; padding-top:40px; padding-bottom:40px;">
      Thanks for shopping with&nbsp;us! <!-- using &nbsp; will prevent orphan words -->
    </td>
  </tr>
</table>


</td></tr></table>
<!--[if (gte mso 9)|(IE)]>
</td></tr></table>
<![endif]-->
</td></tr></table></body></html>

Just be aware that this template doesn't act fluid when resizing your browser window. It works in all major email clients however.