The question looks trivial until the shop stops doing three orders a day and starts doing ten. That is when it turns out “we know about the order” and “the person who has to pack it knows about it” are two different things — and the gap between them is measured in hours.
In practice there are five options. Each has its place; none is universal.
1. E-mail from the shop
The default, and the worst of them if it is meant to alert. It mixes with the rest of the post, has one recipient and is usually muted on the phone. We went through it in detail in Why e-mail is not good enough as an order alert.
It makes sense as an archive and as a daily summary. As an alarm clock, no.
2. The administration’s mobile app
It works and it is free. Two catches: only whoever is signed in sees the notification, and there is no way to tell what matters. Either everything rings or nothing does. For one person who packs and sells, that is enough. For a team it degenerates into “did you see that?”.
3. SMS
Always delivered, and it will wake you at night. Every message costs, the text is short and there is nothing to reply to. The sensible use is narrow: orders above a certain value, or an outage you have to hear about over the weekend. As a channel for every order it is expensive and irritating.
4. Team chat
Slack, Teams, Discord, Telegram. A channel the team is in all day anyway, where a message can be commented on, assigned, and where you can see who picked it up. Notifications can be tuned per channel, so nothing has to be silenced wholesale.
There is one drawback and it deserves naming: push every event into the main team channel and people will mute it within a week — putting you back where e-mail left you. Hence a dedicated channel, and only events that need action.
5. Your own webhook
If you already have an internal system — warehouse, fulfilment, a sheet that drives label printing — the best place to deliver the data is straight into it. It needs somebody to write and maintain, but the reward is that the order never waits for a human anywhere.
What to look for
Whatever the channel, four questions are worth asking:
- Who will see it? If the answer is “one specific person”, you have a single point of failure called annual leave.
- Can you mute the noise without muting the signal? If not, in a month everything will be muted.
- What happens when the target service is down? A good integration retries and tells you delivery failed. A bad one drops the event silently.
- Do you also hear when nothing is happening? Three hours of silence during a normally busy stretch is often worth more than any single order.
Recommendation
For most shops: chat for events that need action, e-mail for the archive, and one daily summary. Keep SMS for exceptions; your own webhook is worth it once you have a system to plug it into.
That is how our Notify addon is built: nine channels, five event types and a choice of which go where. On your CMS it runs without touching the storefront template.