Immediate & Batch Notifications

Smart Order Notifications offers two options of when and how to send notifications.

Immediate Notifications

As the name suggests an immediate notification is sent instantly after an order is created or updated and the rules of the notification match the state of of the order. This immediacy is very useful for merchants who want to send customer emails or individual supplier emails / webhooks without delay.

How Immediate is Immediate?

Just like Shopify, there's sometimes a small amount of latency (delay caused by network traffic and processing) between the creation or updating of an order and the arrival of a smart notification. This is normally just a few seconds for our app to receive the order data from Shopify, match the rules and send the notification but during periods of high order volume, such as Black Friday / Cyber Monday, it can take up to a few minutes for immediate notifications to arrive.

Repeat Notifications Smart Order Notifications will not send repeat notifications for the same order / notification pairing. Once a particular notification's rules have been triggered for a specific order and the notification has been successfully sent, the notification will not be triggered again for that order. This means that if you want multiple notifications to be sent for one order, you'll need to configure multiple notifications in the app.

How Do I Set Up An Immediate Notification?

When you create a new notification in Smart Order Notifications, immediate is the default state of a new notification. You will find the setting under When should notifications be sent? in the notification edit screen, as shown below:

Batch Notifications

Batch notifications are scheduled and are send at a cadence determined by you. These notifications can be set up to send weekly or daily. By their very nature batch notifications send one or more order in a single notification, which is typically used for sending lists of orders to suppliers or staff.

Attachments Batch notifications are commonly used with our attachment templates to create CSVs with matching orders and line items. To find out more read our CSV template guide.

Which Orders Are Included In A Batch?

In the simplest terms, orders that have not been sent by a given notification before, that match your notification rules, and have been created or updated since the last time the batch was sent will qualify to be included in the notification.

This means that orders won't be sent twice in different batches by the same notification but could be sent by different notifications with different rules set up. Our batch processing jobs operate using your Shopify store's time zone.

Batch Not Bulk! It's important to note that batch notifications are not designed for sending many notifications for many orders in bulk at once. They are designed to send one notification containing any orders that have matched your notification rules in the period since your last batch was sent. This is perfect for creating CSVs of many orders on a daily or weekly basis but not for sending many emails to many customers at a specific interval.

Weekly Notifications

When configuring a weekly batch notification you can opt to send on a specific day of the week and at a specific time of day. This means that you can align notifications with manufacturing windows and supplier time zones.

To setup a weekly notification you can select 'Send in a batch at an interval I specify' from the 'When should notifications be sent' menu. You can then select a weekly frequency, as well as the day and time of your choosing.

Daily Notifications

A daily notification allows you to select which time of day you'd like to send your orders in the batch. As with weekly notifications, you can select 'Send in a batch at an interval I specify', then choose 'Once a day' from the frequency menu and the time you'd like the notification to be sent from the 'Time of day' menu.