Introduction
If you sell custom made-to-order products with longer processing times like T-shirts, mugs or even prescription eyewear, you may want to automate status update emails to your customers to inform them about the production stage of their orders.
The Use Case
A Shopify store owner on Reddit who creates custom products wants to send automated emails to customers depending on the stage of production of their order.
Essentially, the store owner wants an automated way to send post-purchase and pre-shipping updates to customers.
You can see the original Reddit post 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 (“Cut and on the way to get painted” in our example) and check “Sends an Email to customer when status is set”
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 “Cut and on the way to get painted” and click the Update button
8. Voila, the order’s status is now “Cut and on the way to get painted”
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, check out their pre-built task called “Email customers when their order is tagged.”
Their documentation is technical but comprehensive.
Using the above task, you could create a task whereby you might tag an order with “cut,” which would trigger an email to the customer informing them of the stage of their order.
Conclusion
Customer Order Status and Mechanic are two apps that can help you send post-purchase and pre-shipping updates to customers.
Whereas Mechanic is better for tech-savvy folks, Custom Order Status may be the easier option for most stores.
What’s your favourite way to send status updates to customers?