Connect Shopify customer events with WhatsApp conversations
Your store already knows the moment an order is placed, paid, sent, cancelled or refunded. Endelir takes those events straight from Shopify and sends the customer a message on your business number, then keeps the reply in the same shared inbox as everything else. The connection is built and not yet switched on; the plain limits are further down this page.
The store knows, and the customer asks anyway
A Shopify store sends its confirmation and its shipping notice by email. Some customers read them and some do not, and the ones who do not ask where the parcel is a week later — on the number printed on the packaging, not by replying to the address the email came from.
Answering is a hunt. Someone opens the Shopify admin, finds the order, copies a tracking number, pastes it into a chat, then does the same for the next person. No single one of those is difficult. They just arrive all day, and the information was sitting in the store the whole time.
The store tells Endelir, and Endelir tells the customer
You connect the store once. Endelir registers webhooks with Shopify, so an order that is created, paid, fulfilled or cancelled, and a refund that is issued, reaches us as it happens. Each of those five events can send the customer a message template on your business number, with the order number, the total, the payment status or the tracking details filled in from the order itself.
The reply is not a dead end. Endelir creates or updates a contact from the phone number on the order, so the message and whatever comes back sit in the shared inbox where your team already works — beside the stored order, its line items and its delivery address, and beside everything else that customer has written to you.
The integration itself is held closed on our servers until it has passed live acceptance, so no Shopify store is sending anything through it today. The parts the messages rest on — approved templates, the shared inbox, chat flows, contacts — are live now, and a store that can call an HTTP endpoint can send the same order and shipping updates through the Endelir API in the meantime.
How it works
- 1 You connect the store Create a custom app in your Shopify admin and paste three things into Endelir: the shop domain, the Admin API access token and the API secret. Nothing is stored until Shopify confirms the credentials work.
- 2 Endelir registers the webhooks Six of them — order created, order updated, order paid, order fulfilled, order cancelled, refund created. If the store accepts none of them the connection is reported as failed rather than quietly saved.
- 3 You choose which events message the customer Order confirmation, payment confirmation, shipment tracking, cancellation and refund are switched on one at a time. An event you leave off is still recorded, it just does not write to anyone.
- 4 You map the template variables Each event uses a template Meta has approved for your number. You say which Shopify field fills each variable — order number, total, currency, payment status, tracking number, carrier, tracking link, cash-on-delivery amount.
- 5 An order arrives Endelir takes the phone number from the order, the customer record or the billing or shipping address, creates or updates the contact, and stores the order against it with its line items, totals and addresses.
- 6 The message goes out and is recorded Sent, or failed with the reason, on the notifications screen. One that failed — a template not yet approved, a number Meta rejected — can be sent again by hand once the cause is fixed.
- 7 The customer replies to a person The reply opens as an ordinary conversation in the shared inbox, assigned like any other, with the order and the history already on screen.
What this looks like in practice
A retailer sells homeware on Shopify, and most of its customers pay on delivery. Every order used to produce a confirmation email and a phone call somebody had to make, and the courier still turned up at houses where no one was expecting a parcel.
With the store connected, the order-created event sends a short confirmation to the number given at checkout: order number, items, total, and a line asking the customer to reply if anything is wrong. When the order is fulfilled a second message carries the tracking number and the carrier's link. A change of address now arrives as a conversation the day the order is placed, instead of as a failed delivery a week later.
What can happen next
Which stores this suits
What to know before you set it up
The Shopify connection is not switched on. It is built into Endelir and held closed until the integration has passed live acceptance against a real store, and until then no order event is reaching anyone. Everything the messages rest on is live and proven now, so a store that can call an HTTP endpoint can send order and shipping updates through the Endelir API today and move to this connection when it opens.
There is no abandoned-checkout event. The webhooks Endelir registers cover orders created, updated, paid, fulfilled and cancelled, and refunds created; a customer who leaves a checkout half finished never produces one of those, so abandoned-cart recovery is not part of this integration. Two of the notification types on the settings screen, delivery confirmation and cash-on-delivery verification, are the same story — you can map them and send them by hand, and no Shopify event fires them.
Each of these messages starts a conversation, so each one goes out as a message template Meta has approved in advance. Endelir looks for a template named for the event — shopify_order_confirmation, shopify_shipment_tracking and so on — which has to exist and be approved before that event can send anything. Keep the selling out of them: an order update is a Utility message, a discount on the next order is Marketing and goes to customers who have opted in, as a campaign to a contact group. And a message needs a phone number — an order that carries only an email address produces nothing.
What to watch
- How many orders arrived from the store, and how many produced a message
- How many notifications were sent, how many failed, and why
- How many people reply to an order message, and what they ask
- How many delivery-address corrections arrive before dispatch rather than after
- How many parcels are refused or returned undelivered
- How quickly a reply to an order message is answered
Related
Questions people ask
Is the Shopify integration available now?
Not yet. The connection is built into Endelir and held closed on our servers until it has passed live acceptance against a real store, so no Shopify shop is sending order messages through it today. We would rather say that here than let you plan a launch around it. If order and shipping messages are what you need this month, your store or your middleware can call the Endelir API and send the same templates now, and the work you do on templates and wording carries over unchanged when the connection opens.
Which Shopify events can send a WhatsApp message?
Five. An order created can send a confirmation, an order paid a payment confirmation, an order fulfilled the shipment and tracking details, an order cancelled a cancellation notice, and a refund a refund notice. Endelir registers a sixth webhook for orders updated, which keeps the stored order in step with the store but does not message anyone on its own. Each of the five is switched on separately, so you can start with order confirmation alone and add the rest once you have seen how customers reply.
What do I need to connect my Shopify store?
Three things from your Shopify admin: the shop domain, an Admin API access token and the API secret, which you get by creating a custom app in the store. Endelir checks the credentials against Shopify before saving anything, then registers the webhooks. If the store rejects them, the connection is reported as failed rather than saved — an integration that looks connected and receives nothing is worse than one that plainly did not work. You also need your business number connected to Endelir, and the message templates for the events you intend to use.
Do I need approved message templates for this?
Yes. Each of these messages starts a conversation rather than answering one, and business-initiated messages go out as templates Meta has approved in advance. Endelir looks for a template named for the event — shopify_order_confirmation, shopify_payment_confirmation, shopify_shipment_tracking, shopify_order_cancelled, shopify_refund_processed. You write the wording, submit it from Endelir, and map its variables onto Shopify fields: order number, total, currency, payment status, tracking number, carrier, tracking link. Meta decides what is approved and how quickly, and no event can send a template that is not approved yet.
Can Endelir send abandoned cart reminders from Shopify?
No. The webhooks this integration registers are about orders and refunds, and an abandoned checkout is neither — the customer never placed an order, so nothing reaches Endelir to act on. Adding Shopify's abandoned-checkout event would be a change to the integration, not a setting you can switch on. There is a further point worth making regardless of the plumbing: someone who typed a phone number into a checkout field and left has not asked you to message them, and a reminder of that kind is business-initiated marketing that needs their opt-in like any other.
Does it handle cash-on-delivery orders?
A cash-on-delivery order is an order like any other, so the order-created event confirms it and the fulfilment event carries the tracking, both to the number given at checkout — which for these orders is usually the number the courier will ring. That is the part worth having. The separate cash-on-delivery verification template is a different matter: it exists in the settings and you can map and send it by hand, but no Shopify webhook fires it automatically. If confirming COD orders before dispatch is the whole reason you are here, the API route is the honest answer today.
What happens when a customer replies to an order message?
It opens as an ordinary conversation in your shared inbox and can be assigned to a person, exactly like a message that arrived on its own. Their reply also opens the customer-service window Meta allows, so your team answers freely inside it with no template involved. Whoever picks it up can see the order Endelir stored against that contact — number, items, totals, payment and fulfilment status, tracking, addresses — so the answer does not start with a search of the Shopify admin. A keyword rule or a chat flow can take the first step if the question is one you get every day.
Ready to connect commerce events to the customer conversation?
Tell us you run a Shopify store and we will set the connection up with you when it opens — and show you what your store can send through the Endelir API in the meantime. We do it on a call, not through a help article.
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