Overview

You can increase the value of your shop by using YITH WooCommerce SMS Notifications. You can keep an eye on what’s going on with your store in real time, even when you’re away from your PC. You’ll also be in the loop on customer orders.

You can also make the shopping experience in your store better for customers by offering them the option to be texted when their order is processed or shipped.

Step 1—Select the SMS provider

First of all, go to the General Settings tab, and choose the SMS provider you want to use in the SMS service settings option.

Note: Each SMS provider will require some credentials that you will receive from them. These credentials will vary depending on the provider.

To find the complete list of all the SMS services available you can check this page.

Step 2—Configure the text sending

Once you have chosen the SMS service, the next step is to manage the sending settings.

Step 3—Select the URL shortening service

From the General settings tab, you can now select the shortening URL service. This will automatically turn any URL included in the SMS text into a shorter version, so you can spare characters.

1. First, you get to choose between one of the supported services, either Bitly or TinyURL.

2. Then, enter the access tokens, based on the selected service.

Bitly

To get it, follow these steps:

TinyURL

Save and you’re ready to go.

Step 4—Set charset & SMS length

The Charsets option allows you to send an SMS text by using special Unicode (https://www.utf8-chartable.de/) characters.

First of all, you will have to choose between the available charsets:

You will find the following options:

• CJK – Chinese Japanese Korean (CJK Radicals Supplement, CJK Symbols and Punctuation, CJK Strokes, Enclosed CJK Letters and Months, CJK Compatibility, CJK Unified Ideographs Extension A, CJK Unified Ideographs, CJK Compatibility Ideographs, and CJK Compatibility Forms sets).
• Greek (Greek and Coptic sets).
• Cyrillic.
• Armenian.
• Hebrew.
• Arabic (Arabic, Arabic Supplement, Arabic Presentation Forms-A, and Arabic Presentation Forms-A sets).
• Hangul (Hangul Jamo, Hangul Compatibility Jamo, and Hangul Syllables sets).
• Thai.
• Latin Extended (Latin-1 Supplement, Latin Extended-A, and Latin Extended-B).

Note: by using special characters, the SMS length will reduce to 70 characters.

Once done, you’ll find the option to enable the SMS length, which allows you to extend the single SMS length (default is 160).

Step 5—Enable SMS notifications for order statuses

Now it’s time to select the order statuses for which you would like to send notifications to your customers and to the store administrators.

Go to the “SMS Settings” tab, customize the text and enable the notification for each order status you would like to add. It supports all default WooCommerce order statuses.

Thanks to the full integration with YITH WooCommerce Custom Order Status, you can send SMS notifications also for all the custom order statuses you have created.

After that, you can customize the text for each notification or use the default one.

As you can see in the image below, you can customize the admin message with just one text and the specific placeholders.

If you want to dynamically retrieve information about the user and the order, you can use one of the following placeholders in the message content:

• {site_title}: Website name
• {order_id}: Order number
• {order_total}: Order total
• {order_status}: Order status
• {billing_name}: Billing name
• {billing_first_name}: Billing first name
• {billing_last_name}: Billing last name
• {shipping_name}: Shipping name
• {shipping_first_name}: Shipping first name
• {shipping_last_name}: Shipping last name
• {shipping_method}: Shipping method
• {additional_notes} = Additional Notes
• {order_date} = Order Date

The plugin automatically sends SMS notifications when order status changes. However, if you want to send a new SMS message manually, you have to go to the “Edit Order” page. There, you’ll find an option to manually send a new SMS message to the user who owns the selected order.

From there, you can type the specific message and click “Send”. If the checkbox isn’t enabled, it means that the SMS sending feature isn’t available for the user associated with the order. Enabling it will change this behavior.