Telegram notifications and Viber/SMS for customers for WooCommerce

The plugin does two things. It sends your WooCommerce store events to you in Telegram — a new order, a status change, a failed payment, low stock, form leads. And, since version 1.3.0, it messages the customer on Viber or by SMS when their order changes status: “received”, “shipped, tracking number 2045…”, “cancelled”.

Telegram notifications for you stay free, as before. Viber and SMS messages to customers are a Pro feature: they go through your own TurboSMS, Alpha SMS, or SMS-Fly account, and the first 7 days of Pro unlock with a button in the settings, no payment needed.

What the customer sees

The customer checks out as usual — on the classic or the block checkout, with nothing extra to fill in. As soon as the order reaches a status you enabled messages for, the customer gets a short Viber message from your store’s name. If the number has no Viber or the message isn’t delivered within an hour, the service sends the same text by SMS on its own.

• Processing: “CatCode Demo Store: order #868 received, total ₴2,038.00. Thank you!”
• Completed: “order #868 has been shipped. Tracking number: 20450000000000” — the number comes from the Nova Poshta and Ukrposhta modules or from any order field.

Each status is sent to a customer only once: re-saving the order in the admin panel or a double call from a payment gateway won’t produce a second message.

How it works, step by step

1. The customer places an order; WooCommerce moves it to a status such as “Processing”.
2. The plugin checks whether messages are enabled for that status and Pro is active, and marks the “order + status” pair as queued.
3. Sending happens in the background through Action Scheduler, which ships with WooCommerce — checkout never waits for the service to respond.
4. The phone number is normalised to the international E.164 format based on the order country: 093 123 45 67 in an order from Ukraine becomes 380931234567, +48 731 234 567 becomes a Polish number, and 9 digits without a code are read as a number from the order country rather than guessed from the first digits.
5. The number’s country picks the SMS sender name and the Viber sender; the *= line covers all other countries.
6. The text is built from your template; a line where every tag is empty (say, “Tracking number:” with no number) is simply dropped.
7. Once the service accepts the message, a private note with its ID appears in the order and an “OK” line in the log. If the service is unreachable, there’s one retry after 5 minutes; a rejection by the service (wrong sender name, no funds) is not retried — it shows up in the log.

Under the hood

• Three integrations built to the services’ official documentation: TurboSMS (message/send.json, Viber+SMS hybrid), Alpha SMS (JSON protocol, type viber+sms), SMS-Fly (REST API v2, channels ["viber","sms"], ttl in minutes).
• The service key and the bot token are stored encrypted; the key field never displays the saved value.
• The licence and SMS settings live in separate options — the regular “Save” on the Telegram tab doesn’t touch them.
• Double-send protection: the “queued / sending / sent” state is written to the order meta before the service is called.
• Numbers in the log are masked (+38093***4567).
• Developer filters: cc_tgnotify_sms_countries (add a country), cc_tgnotify_sms_tracking_number (tracking number from another source), cc_tgnotify_sms_api_url (test environment).

How to install

1. Plugins → Add New → Upload Plugin → choose the archive telegram-order-notifications-for-woocommerce-1.3.1.zip → “Install Now” → “Activate”. You can update over the previous version — the Telegram settings are kept. The version in the WordPress.org directory only includes Telegram notifications; the Viber / SMS tab is in the archive from this page.
2. For Telegram: WooCommerce → Telegram notifications, paste the bot token from @BotFather, find the chat_id, and send a test.
3. For customers: the Viber / SMS to customers tab → “Start 7 days free”, or paste a purchased key.
4. Pick the service, paste the API key, choose the channel and per-country sender names (UA=MyStore, *=MyStore).
5. Tick the statuses to send messages for and adjust the texts if needed. Click “Check key and balance”, then send a test to your own number.