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Orders

“Where is my order?” is one of the most common questions a store gets. With a store connected, your agent answers it — from the real order — instead of routing it to a person.

Order lookup works the same way for Shopify and WooCommerce. Two details differ, both called out where they matter below: how much shipping detail each platform can supply, and — on Shopify — which customer fields your app is approved to read.

Order lookup (WISMO)

A shopper asks about their order in chat. The agent asks for the order number and a contact detail, checks both against the real order, and answers.

Verification is the whole design

The agent will only reveal order details when the shopper supplies both:

  1. The exact order number, and
  2. An email or phone number that matches the one on that order

A wrong contact and a non-existent order return exactly the same answer. The agent says it couldn’t find the order and shows nothing else — no “that order exists but the email doesn’t match”, no partial detail, no hint. That’s deliberate: it means nobody can walk order numbers to discover which ones are real, or fish for a customer’s contact details.

Matching is forgiving about formatting, not about identity. Email case doesn’t matter; phone numbers are compared digit by digit, so +1 (555) 010-9999 and 15550109999 are the same number.

What the shopper gets back

A verified lookup returns the order’s status, whatever fulfillment detail the store can supply, and — where available — a link to the order on your own store.

How much shipping detail comes back depends on the platform. Shopify supplies carrier, tracking, and delivery dates per fulfillment. WooCommerce has no built-in fulfillment record: carrier and tracking come from a supported shipment-tracking plugin. Without one, a WooCommerce answer carries the order’s status but no carrier or tracking number.

A shopper who has already verified an order in the conversation can also ask for their recent orders without re-verifying each one. On WhatsApp that shortcut is available immediately, because WhatsApp has already verified the shopper’s phone number and orders are matched against that same number — a shopper only ever sees orders placed under their own verified number. On every other channel it stays locked until they verify an order in that conversation. Either way it is never a way in to someone else’s orders.

Requirements

Order lookup needs a connected store whose order permission is healthy. If your store’s credentials were revoked or the connection went unhealthy, the agent stops offering order lookup rather than failing halfway through a conversation. Check the connection status on Commerce → Shopify or Commerce → WooCommerce.

When the agent can’t answer

Some order questions have no answer in the store — a refund dispute, a wrong item, a delivery that never arrived. You can enable human handoff on your store agent so those conversations reach a person instead of a dead end. It’s available on every plan, including the trial, but it’s off until you switch it on for that agent. See Inbox & Human Handoff.

Order-status updates

After a shopper has verified an order in chat, the agent can offer to keep them posted. If they accept, they get shipping updates pushed into the same conversation, on the same channel they were already using.

Only one gate has to open, and it belongs to the shopper: they have to opt in, in the conversation, after verifying their order. You cannot subscribe a shopper on their behalf, and a shopper cannot subscribe to an order they haven’t proven is theirs.

Updates reach Telegram, WhatsApp and Messenger only. On any other channel — the website widget, Discord, Slack, Google Chat, the playground — the agent declines the opt-in and says so, rather than promising an update it can’t send. The limit is the same on both platforms.

On your side, the update types are on by default once a store is connected — there’s nothing to switch on first. A Shopify store has three; a WooCommerce store has two. You can turn any of them off individually on the store’s page in Commerce; switching one off stops that update for every shopper, including ones who already opted in.

Changing those toggles is an admin action; Members can see them but can’t change them.

What triggers an update

Updates fire on order progress, and what counts as progress depends on the platform.

On Shopify, three things trigger one: the order is confirmed as paid, it ships, and the carrier reports a milestone — out for delivery, delivered, a failed attempt, or a delivery problem.

On WooCommerce, two do: the order is confirmed as paid, and the order reaches completed in your store, which is what sends the “on its way” message. There is no separate delivery message — WooCommerce has no carrier-event feed to listen to, so completed is the last update a shopper gets. If the order carries tracking data the message includes the tracking link; if it doesn’t, the same message goes out without one.

Nothing marketing-shaped is ever sent through this channel; it exists to answer “where is my order?” before the shopper has to ask again.

The delivery mechanism is shared — same opt-in, same channels, same wording. WooCommerce simply carries fewer update types, because it has no carrier-event feed.

With two stores connected

Each store has its own store agent, and order lookup runs against that agent’s own store. A shopper asking your Shopify store agent about a WooCommerce order won’t be found — the two are not searched together.

If you sell across both, route shoppers to the store agent that matches where they bought, or keep each store on its own channel so the question lands in the right place to begin with.

Behind the scenes: tool names

If you look at a conversation trace, you’ll see the order tools named shopify_order_status, shopify_list_orders, and subscribe_order_updates.

Those names are historical, not literal. The same tools serve WooCommerce stores. A WooCommerce-only merchant will still see a tool called shopify_order_status doing the WooCommerce lookup. Nothing is misrouted — the tools resolve whichever stores you actually have connected.

Troubleshooting

The agent says it can’t find an order that definitely exists

Almost always the contact detail. The email or phone the shopper is giving has to match the one on that order — not the address they usually use, and not the one on their account. Ask them to check the order confirmation email.

The agent won’t offer order lookup at all

Either the conversation isn’t with your store agent (only that agent carries the commerce tools), or the store connection is unhealthy. Check the connection status under Commerce.

A shopper opted in but gets no updates

Check the store connection’s notification toggles. They’re on by default, but if the matching update type was switched off at some point, the shopper’s opt-in alone won’t produce a message.

Shipping details are missing from an otherwise correct answer

The order was found and verified, but part of the fulfillment detail wasn’t readable. The agent answers with what it has rather than failing the whole lookup.

On WooCommerce this usually means the tracking data isn’t where we read it. We read one place: the record written by the official WooCommerce Shipment Tracking plugin, which Advanced Shipment Tracking (AST) writes to as well. Those two come through. Any other tracking plugin stores its data differently and will not be read at all, so the order looks untracked even though your store shows a tracking number. If no tracking plugin is installed, there is nothing to report in the first place.

Some customer fields — the phone number on the order, and the order’s status page link — are Protected Customer Data, and Shopify withholds them unless your app is allowed to read them. Shopify restricts that access on its cheapest plans, so this is most often a store-plan limit rather than a fault. The agent answers with what it can read rather than failing the lookup. While a field is withheld, a phone-based verification can’t match: ask the shopper to use the email on the order instead.

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