Setting Up Customer Order Notifications
Customer notifications are the emails Helm WMS sends your customers as their orders move: a despatch confirmation, an acknowledgement of a return, a heads-up that an order is waiting on stock. This article covers building one, the triggers and filters that decide when it sends, and how to read the history when a send fails.
What Notification Settings Cover
Helm keeps two kinds of notification apart, and they live on different pages.
Emails to your customers. Built under Settings > Despatch Settings > Notifications. Each pairs an email template with a set of triggers, so an order reaching a given point sends the right message to the right address. That is what this article describes.
Alerts to your own team. Set under Settings > System Settings > System Notification Settings: stock level warnings, whether they arrive by email or inside Helm, the sound they make, and Notification Holiday. Those alerts fill the notification list behind your avatar, and have their own article.
Example scenario: you want customers who bought on your own webstore to get a despatch email, but not customers who bought through a marketplace that emails them already. One notification, with the webstore channel selected and an order status of Despatched, leaves the marketplace orders alone.
Before You Start
You need an active orders email template. Create New Notification stays disabled until an orders template exists, and the page shows a warning carrying a link across to them. Templates live under Settings > System Settings > Email Template Settings, on a page headed Email Templates. Make sure at least one is active: the button unlocks on any orders template, but the picker in step three lists active ones only. The rule works both ways, so a template already used by a notification cannot be set to inactive until it is unassigned.
You need an active mail account. Only active accounts appear in the Mail account list. Set one up under Settings > System Settings > Mail Account Settings if it is empty.
Each notification needs its own name. Names have to be unique within your company.
Orders need a customer and both addresses. Helm only tests an order against your notifications if it has a customer, a shipping address and an invoice address. One missing any of the three will not notify.
You need the right permissions. These are granted separately, so it is common to be able to build a notification but not to diagnose one. If a button is disabled or a page will not open, ask whoever administers Helm for your business to check your permission group against the list below.
A new notification is created Active, not switched off waiting for you. It will email a real customer as soon as an order matches, so deactivate it straight away if you are not ready to go live.
How to Create a Customer Notification
Go to Settings > Despatch Settings > Notifications and choose Create New Notification. The dialog has three steps and will not let you move on until the one you are on is complete.
Name it and set the triggers.
Give it a Notification name you will still recognise months from now.
Under Triggers, choose the Stores and channels it applies to, the Shipping country or countries, and the Order status that should send it. All three are required.
If you include Despatched, a Tracking status field appears and at least one value has to be set.
Add Advanced filters if the triggers are not specific enough. This part is optional.
Choose Continue.
Set the email details.
Fill in the Notification subject, the line the customer sees in their inbox.
Choose the Mail account that sends it. Helm's own mail account fills in Sender name and Sender email for you and locks them; any other account needs both.
Set the Recipient type to Customer Shipping Email, Customer Invoice Email or Other. Choosing Other reveals a Recipient email field that takes as many addresses as you need.
Set a Delay time if the email should not leave immediately. The list offers No Delay Time, one hour, four hours, 12 hours and 24 hours, or type your own number of hours.
Choose Continue.
Choose the template and save.
Pick the template under Email templates. Only active orders templates are listed.
Choose Create Notification and confirm.
How Triggers Decide What Sends
The triggers are the notification's main test, and they are checked together.
Every trigger has to be satisfied at once. A notification listing two channels, three countries and one order status sends only for an order matching on all three lines, so adding values to a line narrows the notification rather than widening it.
Helm re-tests every active notification whenever an order changes meaningfully: a status change, a tag, a note, a folder move, an attachment or a new shipment. There is no send-once lock, so a notification whose triggers still match can send again on the next change. Precise triggers stop that becoming duplicate emails.
You can also fire one deliberately from Order Rules: a rule using the Trigger Notification action sends the notification you name, ignoring its own triggers and filters, and records it on the order timeline.
Advanced Filters & Saved Filters
Advanced filters narrow a notification beyond the triggers. Choose Add Filter to begin, then Add new filter for another line in the same group and Add ‘OR’ Group for an alternative set. Lines within a group all have to be true; groups are alternatives, so any one group passing in full qualifies the notification.
The fields cover the order, its addresses and its contents.
The contents fields answer the most common request, which is to email only when the order contains a particular product: a filter on Order Item SKU or Order Item Category does that without tagging orders first. There is no shipping country filter, because shipping country is already a trigger; invoice country is here because no trigger covers it.
A combination worth reusing can be kept. Open the menu beside the section, choose Save as New and name it, and it appears under Saved Filters next time.
Activating, Testing & Deleting
The list shows Store, Channels, Notification Name, Status and Last Edited. You can search it, sort by name, status or last edited, filter by store, channel or status, and choose which columns show. Click a row to reopen it: in edit mode all three steps are clickable, so you can jump straight to the part you want and finish with Save Changes.
Activate or deactivate. Click the Status chip on the row and confirm. Active means live. Inactive means Helm stops testing it against orders, so it will not send on its own.
Send a test. Open the row's action menu, choose Send Test Notification, add one or more Recipients and choose Send. The test sends the template exactly as stored, so order variable names arrive unreplaced, which is expected: a test proves the mail account and the layout, not the content. To see a merged email, use Preview Notification on a real send.
Delete carefully. Use Delete in the row's action menu, or tick rows for the bulk Delete that appears once something is selected. Deleting takes the triggers and filters with it, so set the Status to Inactive instead for anything seasonal.
Inactive stops a notification triggering itself, but a Trigger Notification action in Order Rules sends it whatever its status, so check your rules before relying on deactivation to stop the emails.
Activating a notification also activates the mail account behind it, and Helm warns you first. It works both ways: deactivating a mail account under Mail Account Settings deactivates every notification linked to it, the most common reason a working notification quietly stops.
Notification History
Notification History, reached from the button at the bottom of the notifications list, is the record of individual sends. Its columns are Notification Name, Order Number, Mail Account, Recipient, Status, Date/Time and Time to Archive. You can search it and filter by Mail Account, Status, Date and Time or Time to Archive: filtering to Error is the quickest way to see only what went wrong.
Error is written only once Helm has given up, and a send is retried several times first. A row at Queued may therefore already have failed once or twice, so nothing is stuck until it reads Error.
Resend Notification appears on failed rows only. It creates a fresh row rather than retrying the old one, so the original stays at Error and a new Queued row appears beside it, carrying the same delay again. Put the cause right first.
Preview Notification appears on every other row. It rebuilds the email from the template and order as they stand now, so read it as what would send today, not a copy of what the recipient received. Helm does not keep sent email, and the preview adds an unsubscribe footer real sends do not carry.
View Log opens the matching entry in Request Logs, where the mail provider's own error message sits.
Rows archive 30 days after they were created, and Time to Archive counts that down. Archiving hides a row rather than deleting it, but the page cannot show archived rows, so treat a month as the practical window.
What About My Own Alerts?
Your own alerts are a separate feature under Settings > System Settings > System Notification Settings, with its own article. One point matters here.
A Notification Holiday silences your own alerts only. Customer notifications keep sending throughout, which is usually what you want. If they also need to stop over a shutdown, deactivate them individually and check no Order Rules rule sends them.
Best Practices & Notes
One Notification, One Job
Recipient type, subject and template are fixed per notification, so a customer despatch email and an internal copy to your team are two notifications, not one. That also lets you deactivate either alone.
Test, Then Watch the First Day
A test proves the mail account works, not that the triggers are right, because a test never looks at an order. After activating, open Notification History the same day and check the rows are the sends you expected and none read Error.
Use Delay Time for Anything Time-Sensitive
A Delay time of one or two hours is a useful buffer on a despatch email: if an order is cancelled shortly after picking, the customer has not already been told it is on its way. The delay runs from the moment the notification qualifies.
FAQ
Why Has the Same Customer Had the Same Email Twice?
Because the order changed again and still matched. Helm re-tests active notifications on tags, notes, folder moves and shipments as well as status changes, and nothing stops a second send. Tighten the triggers, usually by adding a Tracking status or narrowing Order status to one value.
Why Is My Notification Not Sending at All?
Check its Status first, then that the mail account is still active, since deactivating an account deactivates its notifications. Then confirm the order satisfies every trigger, including the shipping country, and has a customer with both addresses.
Why Did an Inactive Notification Still Send?
Almost always an Order Rules rule with a Trigger Notification action, which ignores status as well as triggers. Deactivate the rule or remove the action.
Can I Change a Notification's Template Later?
Yes. Reopen it, go to the Email templates step, choose another template and Save Changes. Emails already sent are unaffected, but Preview Notification on an older row will now show the new template, because it rebuilds from whatever is current.
If a notification is not behaving as you expect, Notification History is almost always the fastest answer: it tells you whether Helm tried, who it tried to reach and what the mail provider said. If it is still unclear, contact support with the notification's name and the order number from the row.
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