Notifications

There are three separate things called notifications: what Horizon emails you, the bell in the app, and the emails your customers receive about their deliveries. Each is set up in its own place.

Emails to you

“Settings”, then “Your emails”, holds the emails Horizon sends to you about your own account. Under “Send me” there are two, each turned on or off on its own: “Weekly summary” and “Critical alerts”.

Turn off what you will not act on. An inbox that is ignored is worse than no notification, because it trains you to ignore the one that mattered.

Some emails link back into the app at the exact view you need, such as the triage view of “Reorder”. Those links are the point of the email, so keeping a notification you act on is worth more than keeping one you merely read.

The same section has “Emails to your customers”, which does not hold any switch for them: “Open customer emails” takes you to the page that does.

The bell

The top bar has a notifications bell. It carries a count of unread alerts, and opening it lists them.

Alerts can be acknowledged, and an acknowledged alert reads “Resolved”. When there is nothing outstanding, the panel says “All clear: no alerts” rather than showing an empty box.

Times are shown relative, as just now, minutes, hours or days ago, so you can see at a glance whether something is current.

What your customers receive

The emails your customers get about their parcels are set up on “Customer emails”, in the “Orders & shipping” section of the sidebar, beside the log of what actually went out. It used to be a view inside Dispatch; old links to that view open it.

It has six tabs:

• “Flows”: an email sent when a parcel has stayed in a status for a number of days and is going where you say.
• “Activity”: every email a flow considered, with what happened and why.
• “Review”: emails the provider could not confirm either way, for a person to settle. Nothing is resent from here.
• “Templates”: the emails flows send, one per key and language.
• “Event emails”: the automatic emails a carrier’s own scans trigger (on its way, out for delivery, delivered and delivery exceptions), a separate engine from flows.
• “Settings”: the switches for those event emails. Turning one off stops that email for every customer; flows are not affected, each carries its own state.

A parcel selected on Track a shipment can be handed to this page as the start of a new flow, or emailed once straight away.

For everything else a shopper meets from Horizon, including the return emails and the public parcel and passport pages, see What your customers see.

Every one of these emails carries your store’s name, logo and colour, comes from your name and sends replies to your reply-to address once you set them. See Branding.

“Your order is on its way”

“On its way” is the first switch on the “Settings” tab. It sends one email per parcel, when the carrier first scans it on the move (collected, handed over or at a depot), so your customer knows the order has left. It is sent once, never again for the same parcel however many scans follow, and never after an out for delivery or delivered email. Only the parcel’s first moving scan sends it: a parcel that was already on its way when you turned the email on does not get it at its next depot scan, days after it left.

It is off until you turn it on, unlike the three older switches, which are on until you turn them off. Many stores already send a “shipped” email of their own, and two emails for one parcel read as a mistake.

For a WooCommerce order whose store has “mark orders complete” on, it is not sent: when we complete the order in your store, WooCommerce emails your customer its own “Completed order” email. The “Event emails” tab shows the skipped row with that reason. Shopify orders are not affected: when we mark a Shopify order fulfilled we ask Shopify not to email your customer, so this is the only email they get.

The same goes for a Wix order whose site has “Send tracking to Wix” on: adding the fulfilment in Wix may make Wix email your customer, and we cannot stop that, so ours is not sent. If the write to Wix failed, Wix sent nothing and ours goes out. See Connect a Wix site.

A scan that is already old when we learn about it (a parcel that has been moving for half a day) is not news: that row reads as not sent, with the reason.

Try an email on yourself

“Send me a test” sits beside each switch on the “Settings” tab, in the template editor next to “Render preview”, and under the live preview on the branding page. It sends that email, exactly as a customer would get it, to you and only you (the address of the person signed in), with a subject starting with [Test]. A flow template is sent with your latest parcel; the unsubscribe link in a test is yours, never your customer’s.

When an email did not go

“Send again” on the “Event emails” tab sends the email again, for real, to the same customer. It is offered for an email that failed or bounced, and for one stuck waiting in the queue for more than a few minutes. The row shows the new state a moment later, and how many times it was sent again. An email that was sent, or that was skipped on purpose, cannot be sent again from here.