Overview
We want to enable users to engage in enjoyable and productive discussions in your Community. Notifications are an important part of this effort.
There are several ways how users get notified about important events in the Community:
Web: Notifications Center aka 'Bell'
App: Push notifications
Emails
Notification Center aka 'Bell'
The notification center is the place where users receive personalized updates on Community life. The Bell is an overlay icon visible to all users at the top right of the Catalog, Watch, and Community pages of your store.
Not seeing the bell?
Check if your Community is enabled and launched, the notification center is a part of the larger Community feature.
If you still do not see the bell it could be because you are on the old catalog experience. Please, contact support to check if you are on the new and improved catalog version.
Please note that custom styles that you have implemented may interfere with the overlay icon. Please, review your implementation with your technical team or contact support.
How do users know there are updates in the Bell?
Users see the number of unread updates on the bell icon itself. We do not send any push notifications to the browsers at the moment.
What events trigger notifications:
New Admin posts in the community
Relevant likes, comments, and replies
We occasionally introduce and test new event types to maximize users' engagement.
Hiding the Bell Icon
We highly recommend that you do not hide the bell icon. The bell icon is designed to encourage engagement in your community which helps drive success among your subscribers and in turn, better profitability for you.
While we recommend you do not hide the bell icon for several reasons, you can do so by adding a simple bit of CSS code to your .css file.
Head to website > Edit code > theme.css (or similarly named .css file) and add the following code:
/* hide Community notifications button */
button[data-action="click->notifications-widget#toggle"] {
display: none !important;
}
Note: Our support team is unable to support you with any custom coding. Please add this code at your own risk. We recommend creating a backup of your theme before making any code changes.
Push Notifications
If your users have your app installed and push notifications enabled, they will be notified about the most important events in the community via push notifications.
The events that trigger push notifications are:
The new post is from an admin
Received a new comment/reply
Received a new like
'@Mentioned'
Managing push notification settings
You can also send push notifications with links to Community content manually through Marketing Tools. Learn more.
On top of managing the push notifications on the app level, your users can individually control what event will send them push notifications in Account > Notification Settings
Email Notifications
We want to enable users to engage in enjoyable and productive discussions in your Community. Notifications are an important part of this effort. We use email notifications to inform users of the events that they may not want to miss.
What emails are sent and when?
We currently send emails for the following events:
The user receives a direct comment or replies to their posts or comments.
The user is mentioned in a comment or post.
A new comment or post was made by someone the user follows.
A new challenge has been posted to the community. This email goes to all community members in the channel where the challenge was posted.
A challenge the user has signed up for has started. This is a reminder email to challenge participants that the challenge has now begun.
The user completes a challenge. This email is a congratulations email that is customizable in the challenge settings.
Anti-spam measures
We do not want to overwhelm your users with unnecessary emails and only send them to users who do not read notifications in the notification center.
This means that not everyone will receive an email based on user conditions. If they've seen the post they will not be notified about it. Similarly, email notifications are delayed to make sure they are not seeing an abundance of emails.
Note: If you're checking email delivery stats, please note that they do not update in real-time. Please allow some time before checking the statistics.
Disabling Emails
By default, all members of your community are opted into receiving email updates from the community. We do this to help drive engagement within your community.
Currently, there is no way to disable new members from being opted in, however, your community members can manually opt out by going to their profile and de-selecting "Community Updates" from their notification options. Alternatively, they can click on 'Unsubscribe' at the bottom of any Community email
Note: Our team is unable to manually disable email notifications for your customers. Your customers will need to manage their email notification settings.