Store alerts on Telegram for your team: orders, customers and what matters

In many small and medium-sized stores, someone keeps the back office open in a tab all day, reloading the order list. Or worse: nobody looks at it until the afternoon, and the urgent order from the morning ships the next day.

An alert on your phone when something important happens solves both problems. Telegram is a good tool for it: bots are free, they take minutes to set up, groups can include the whole team and messages can carry a lot of formatted information.

Why Telegram and not email

• Immediate. The alert reaches your phone instantly, with no spam filters or inboxes.
• By group. Each type of alert can go to a different group, with the people who need it.
• Free. Telegram bots have no per-message fee.
• Easy to set up. You create a bot with @BotFather and add it to the group: with the token and the chat ID it can start sending.

Email is still better for anything that has to be filed or forwarded to someone outside. Telegram is for what you need to see right now.

Which alerts make sense

Orders and payments

• New order, with everything needed to prepare it without opening the back office: products and quantities, carrier, payment method and total.
• Payment confirmed, especially with bank transfers or methods that are confirmed later.
• Status change: useful for whoever handles customer service, to know what has already shipped.
• Order edited: if someone changes an order by hand, so you know who and when.

Customers and sales in progress

• New customer account and new address, for a B2B store that approves accounts manually.
• Product added to cart, in stores with few, high-value sales, where a timely phone call closes the sale.
• Contact form, so a question is not left unanswered until the next day.

Operations

• Low stock on your best-selling products.
• Errors in the store or an integration: a failing payment, an ERP that is not syncing.

Not all of this has to come from the same tool. What matters is that each alert reaches the person who has to act on it.

Groups: who receives what

The typical mistake is to put everything in one group. Within a week it has two hundred messages and nobody reads it. A better approach:

In a store run by one or two people, one group may be enough, but with only the alerts that matter.

Margin in the alert

An order alert that only gives the total does not tell you whether you have made money. If your catalogue holds the cost price of each product, the alert can calculate the gross margin and, after subtracting the shipping you pay, the profit on the order. It is a very direct way to see, day to day, which orders are worth it and which are not.

Personal data: handle with care

A full order alert contains the customer's name, address, phone number and email. That is processing of personal data and it has its rules:

• Private groups, with team members only. Never a public channel or a group with outsiders.
• Check who is in them when someone leaves the company. Removing them from the group is part of revoking their access.
• Only the data needed in each group. The sales group does not need the delivery address.
• A bot with limited access. If the bot also accepts commands, it should only accept them from the chats you configure.
• Treat the bot token like a password: whoever has it can send messages on its behalf.

Do not let the alerts become yet another tool to check

The goal is not to have more notifications but to need to log in less. A few guidelines:

• Each alert with all the information needed to act, without having to open the back office.
• Alerts that repeat a lot (pages visited, for example) are better grouped into a periodic summary than sent one per event.
• Turn off what nobody uses. If an alert has not triggered any action in a month, it is unnecessary.
• A test message when you set it up, so you do not discover the token was wrong on the day of the first order.

Serving customers from the same place

A further step is for the channel to work both ways: the visitor writes in a chat on the store and the team replies from Telegram or from the back office, with the same conversation on both sides. That way, whoever is in the warehouse can answer a question without sitting down at the computer.

And keep the store up to date

Alerts depend on PrestaShop hooks: an order validated, a payment confirmed, a status change. In very old stores, or with outdated payment modules that validate orders in unorthodox ways, the alert sometimes does not fire or is sent twice. Keeping PrestaShop and payment modules up to date is what makes these alerts reliable.

How to solve it in PrestaShop

Avisos de pedidos en Telegram sends an alert to your group when an order is validated, the payment is confirmed, the status changes or someone edits an order; the new order alert includes the customer, products with reference and price, carrier and profit calculated from the cost price, and it works from PrestaShop 1.7.3. RKR Avisos Telegram, for PrestaShop 8 and 9, extends this to eight alerts (new account, address, login, pages visited as a cron summary, contact, customer cart, guest cart and new order with a margin summary), each with its own switch and chat, a test message when saving, and a chat with your customers that can be answered from the back office, from the store and from Telegram, in which only the chats you configure can give commands to the bot.