Order notifications, by email and Telegram
September 02, 2026 by Michael
Shopify already emails you about new orders. So does the phone app, with a cash register sound we all switched off at some point. The problem was never that nobody told us - it was that the message never said the one thing we wanted to know: is this someone we should care about right now?
So we built notifications the way we actually wanted to read them.
Telegram
Our team already lives in Telegram, so that’s where the orders go. Create a channel, add the Panelque bot as an administrator, paste the channel ID into Settings → Telegram, and switch notifications on. A Send test message button confirms the wiring before you wait on a real order.
Every new order posts a short message: the order number, the amount paid, the payment gateway, and - when the customer has any - their tags. Nothing else. It reads in half a second on a phone screen, and the whole team sees the same thing at the same time without anyone having a Shopify seat.
Telegram is for the team. Email is for the person who wants a record. Open Settings → Email notifications and you get three controls: a master switch, the address to send to (empty means your Shopify store email - set it for a shared inbox), and the one that matters most:
Only customers with tags, on by default.
That’s the setting the whole feature grew out of. During a busy week we don’t want an email per order — we want an email when a repeat buyer comes back, when a wholesale account orders again, when someone we’ve flagged as a problem case shows up. Untagged customers stay quiet. Turn it off and every order emails you, same as before.
The email itself names the customer and shows their tags as colored badges - the same colors you assigned in the app, so a wholesale order looks like a wholesale order at a glance in your inbox.
The tags do the work
Both channels pull from the same place: the customer’s tags. Your own - VIP, wholesale, local pickup, whatever fits your business - plus the ones Panelque applies on its own, like regular customer and regular international customer.
The tags are recalculated before the notification goes out, which matters more than it sounds: the order that makes someone a repeat buyer is the order whose notification says so. You find out at the moment it becomes true, not on the next one.
The boring parts we got right
- Only new orders. Order edits, refunds, and the historical orders imported when you first install Panelque never notify. Nobody wants a channel full of last year’s sales on install day.
- Never twice. One message per order, even if a webhook arrives twice.
- Retries when it counts. If Telegram is unreachable, Panelque tries again before giving up.
- Off means off. Switch either channel off and your settings stay filled in for when you switch it back on.
Use one, use both. The Telegram channel has replaced most of our “did that order come through?” conversations, and the inbox stays quiet until someone worth knowing about buys something.