Text messages

Open Emails in the menu and choose Text messages at the top. Your store can text customers about their orders: when an order is confirmed, shipped, out for delivery, delivered or ready for pickup. The texts go out through your own account with an SMS provider (Twilio for now). The provider charges you for every text; Storeloom adds nothing and sees no price.

Connect your provider

Under Your SMS provider, paste three things from your Twilio console and press Connect:

• Account SID: AC followed by 32 letters and digits.
• Auth Token: kept sealed for your store and never shown again.
• Sender: who the texts come from. One of your account’s numbers with its country code (+…), a messaging service (MG…), or a name of 3 to 11 letters and digits where the country allows sender names.

Storeloom checks the credentials with Twilio before keeping them. Connecting sends nothing by itself: every text is off until you switch it on. Some countries, the United States above all, ask you to register a sender before texts are delivered; you do that in your Twilio account. A trial account can text only the numbers you verified there, and the page says so.

Once connected, the page shows the account, its sender and how many texts and parts went out this month. Send a test text sends one of your texts, filled with sample data, to the number you type (it is charged too). Replace credentials and Change sender change the account; Disconnect deletes the credentials, after you confirm, and switches every text off. Your own words for the texts are kept. Only people who may change the store connect or disconnect an account: the assistant and AI connections cannot, nor can they send test texts.

If Twilio refuses the credentials while sending, no more texts go out and the page says so until you replace them.

What a text costs

A provider charges per part. A text of up to 160 plain characters is one part; a longer one goes in parts of 153. One character outside the basic alphabet (most accents of Cyrillic, Greek, Arabic, Chinese, an emoji, or a curly quote) sends the whole text in a dearer one: 70 characters to a part, 67 when there are several. Storeloom’s own words use plain punctuation for this reason. The editor shows the count as you type.

Who gets them

Everyone who gives a phone number with their order gets the texts you have switched on, including customers who order with a phone number only. While any text is on, the checkout says by the phone field that the number may be used to text updates about the order. Say it in your privacy policy too (Settings › Policies).

Texts go in the language the customer shopped in. A text of your own is sent as you wrote it to everyone.

Every text carries a way to stop

• The order confirmation carries the order’s link; its page has Stop texts.
• The other texts end with “Reply STOP to stop” in the customer’s language when your sender is a number or a messaging service. A sender name cannot take a reply, so those texts end with a short link that stops the order’s texts after the customer confirms.
• A customer who replies STOP gets no more texts from your store at that number, and their consent to marketing texts is withdrawn. Paste the address shown under Replies of STOP into your Twilio number’s setting for incoming messages so Storeloom hears of it at once; without it, Storeloom learns of it the next time it tries to text them, from Twilio. START lets texts go again.
• On an order’s page, Texts about this order shows whether its customer is texted, and Stop texts or Send texts again (only if the customer asked you to; it is kept on record with your name) after you confirm.

The texts

The five texts are listed under The texts, each On or Off, with how it reads now. Open one, or open the email of the same name and choose its Text message tab:

• Send this text switches it on or off.
• Text: the words, with Liquid as in the emails. Insert at cursor adds the store name, order number, order link, order total, first name, tracking link and number, carrier, pickup place and the way to stop.
• Preview shows it with sample data, with its characters and parts, and names the character that makes it dearer.
• Apply in the bar at the top keeps it. Use Storeloom’s text goes back to Storeloom’s words after you confirm.

A text of your own must carry a way to stop (the way to stop, or the order’s link) and stay within 600 characters. The emails list shows Text on beside each email whose text is on.

When texts go

• Quiet hours: on from 21:00 to 08:00 in your store’s time zone unless you change them. A text due in them waits until they end and goes only if it is still true (an “out for delivery” text is dropped once the parcel is delivered). The order confirmation always goes at once.
• Most texts in 24 hours: 1,000 unless you change it, from 1 to 100,000. Texts over it are not sent. It caps what a mistake, a bulk change or a run of fake orders can cost you.

Each moment is texted once per order (once per parcel for shipping), whatever happens twice. Test orders are never texted, and neither are cancelled orders.

Texts that did not arrive

The order’s timeline shows each text: sent, delivered, or not sent or not delivered with the reason in plain words and Twilio’s code for looking it up. Texts that did not arrive lists the last 30 days; Details shows the reason in full. When Twilio did not answer, a text is shown as not confirmed and is never sent a second time: Twilio’s own report says later whether it went.

What is kept

Storeloom keeps no text’s words and no phone number in its record of texts: the order has the number, and the words can be made again. The numbers that replied STOP are kept until they reply START or the customer is erased. Twilio keeps its own log in your account, under your contract with it. A customer’s data copy lists the texts about their orders.

To keep the cost down and avoid abuse, enable in your Twilio account only the countries your store ships to.