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Selling

Push Notifications: Messages to Shoppers' Browsers

Send a short notification to every shopper who turned on notifications from your store, and tell shoppers automatically when their order ships.

Overview

Marketing → Push sends a browser notification to every shopper who turned on notifications from your store. It appears on their phone or computer screen, like a message from an app, and opens your store when they tap it.

Push notifications are part of every plan. Sending one needs the owner, admin or manager role.

The Subscribers card shows how many browsers can receive your notifications now.

How shoppers subscribe

After a successful payment, the order confirmation page asks "Want updates on your order?" with Enable notifications and No thanks. A shopper who clicks Enable notifications and allows notifications in their browser is subscribed, and that browser is linked to the order they just placed. If they were signed in to their account, the subscription is also linked to their customer record. Pickup orders are not offered the shipping notice, since nothing ships.

Shoppers can turn notifications off at any time in their browser settings. A subscription that stops working is switched off the next time a send reaches it, and is not tried again.

When an order ships

When you mark an order or part of it as shipped (from the order page, a bulk action, the API, or a supplier's tracking number), BestWebby sends a notification to the browsers that asked about that order, and to those of a signed-in customer who placed it, alongside the shipping email. It says the same as the email's subject and first line ("Your Maple & Oak order has shipped", "Order #AB12CD34 has shipped"), in the language the shopper bought in, and opens the order's tracking page on your store when it has one. Each parcel gets its own notification.

It is not sent for pickup orders. A shipping notification that could not be queued is written to the order's history, the same way a shipping email that was not sent is.

Send a notification

  1. Go to Marketing → Push.
  2. Enter a Title (up to 120 characters), for example "Weekend sale is live".
  3. Enter the Message (up to 500 characters).
  4. Optionally add a Link (it must start with https:// or http://). Tapping the notification opens it; with no link, it opens your store's home page.
  5. Click Send to followed by your number of subscribers.

The notification goes to every subscribed browser, however many there are. You can send up to 10 notifications an hour.

Send to one customer

On a customer's page, under Send a message, choose Push to send a notification to that customer's own subscribed browsers only. It is available when the customer turned on notifications while signed in. See Customers.

Common questions

Why does the button say "No subscribers yet"? Nobody has turned on notifications from your store yet. Shoppers are asked on the order confirmation page.

Is the notification translated for French-speaking shoppers? The notifications you write are sent exactly as you write them, to every subscriber. The shipping notification is in the language the shopper bought in.

Why do some shoppers never see the question? It appears only in browsers that support notifications, and not again in a browser where the shopper clicked No thanks.

Can I schedule a notification? No. It is sent when you click the button.