Introduction
If your orders do not ship immediately, you may want to add statuses to your orders that can trigger pre-saved messages to notify your customers when their orders will ship/be dispatched.
The Use Case
A Shopify store wants to notify their customer when their order will ship.
According to the example, they want their order to have one of three dispatch statuses:
- Dispatched Today
- Dispatched Tomorrow
- Dispatched on Monday
Each status should trigger an email notification to the customer.
You can read the original Shopify Community post titled “Order Status & Dispatch Notification?” here.
Solutions
Based on my research, there are two apps that let you send emails to customers triggered by order statuses and 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 (“Dispatched Today” in our example), check “Sends an Email to customer when status is set” and click “Save.”
3b. Repeat this process for “Dispatched Tomorrow” and “Dispatched on Monday”
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 the status you want to assign 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, 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 status and when their order will be dispatched
Whereas Mechanic is better for tech-savvy folks, Custom Order Status may be the easier option for most stores.
How do you like to update your customers on their order status?