How many order messages is too many

Three messages per order. Confirmed, on its way, arrived. Every additional one spends attention you will want later, and the customer's tolerance is a budget you draw down whether you notice or not.

Why platforms emit eleven

An e-commerce platform's status changes exist for its own bookkeeping: payment authorised, payment captured, on hold, processing, partially fulfilled, completed. Hooking a generic status-changed event to a messaging integration means the customer receives your warehouse's internal monologue.

The exceptions worth adding

Two more messages earn their place, when they are true:

• A delay. Proactively, before the promised date passes. This is the single most goodwill-generating message a shop can send, and almost nobody sends it.
• An action needed from them. Payment failed, address unclear, something to confirm. Anything where their silence stops the order.

Let them choose

A setting - all updates, or only the important ones - reduces blocks and costs almost nothing to offer. Somebody who finds three messages too many currently has exactly one tool available, and it is the one that takes your number down with it.

Group the ones that arrive together

An order that is packed, picked up and out for delivery within an hour should produce one message, not three. Batch anything within a short window into a single update - it reads better and, on a per conversation billing model, it is also cheaper.

The test

Read the whole sequence for one order, in order, as one screen. If any message would make you think "why are they telling me this", it should not be sent - and that judgement is easier to make reading them together than deciding on each in isolation.