Introduction
If you run a store that sells custom products with additional production steps before shipping and want to update your customers on the status of their order, this tutorial will help you automate order readiness status updates.
The Use Case
A Shopify store wants to implement the ability to add the following four stages of “order readiness” to orders:
- Sent to production
- Received from production
- Preparing for shipment
- Shipped
Each of the four stages above should trigger an email notification to the customer.
As Shopify already sends a default “Shipping confirmation” notification, our example will focus on the three statuses before “Shipped.”
You can read the original Shopify Community post titled “Add Order Readiness Statuses” here.
Solutions
Based on my research, there are two apps that let you send emails to customers triggered by order statuses or tags:
- Custom Order Status (for those seeking a simple solution) with statuses
- Mechanic (for the technically-inclined) with tags
Custom Order Status
If you’re going to try Custom Order Status, follow these steps:
1. From Dashboard, click “Create and Manage Statuses”
2. On Status Settings, click “New Status”
3. Enter your Status Name (“Sent to production” in our example), check “Sends an Email to customer when status is set” and click “Save.”
3b. Repeat the same process for the three other statuses you want to add.
4. Under “Email Templates,” click on the status you created and edit its corresponding email template.
5. Under Orders, click “Sync”
6. Find the order you want to tag and click the grey “– not set –” box to change the order’s status
7. In the Update Status pop-up window, select “Sent to production” and click the Update button
8. Once you update the order status, the text in the grey box should change from “– not set –” to your chosen status name.
9. Once you update the order’s status, your customer will receive an email based on the template you created for the status.
Mechanic
If you’re going to try Mechanic, you can try their pre-built task called “Email customers when their order is tagged.” It will accomplish the same result as above but instead of using statuses, Mechanic will use Shopify’s in-built tag system.
Conclusion
Customer Order Status and Mechanic are two apps that can help you notify customers of their order readiness statuses in Shopify.
Whereas Mechanic is better for tech-savvy folks, Custom Order Status may be the easier option for most stores.
Are there other apps I may have missed?