Order Pulse
Continuous order monitoring that alerts you when your store stops converting — before you notice it yourself.
Order Pulse is part of Cassian Sentinel™. It collects your store's hourly order counts and analyses them for anomalies — whether that's zero orders during a period when you'd normally have several, a sudden significant drop, or a gradual decline that would be easy to miss until it becomes a real problem.
Most store owners only notice order problems when they check their dashboard. By then, hours have passed. Order Pulse collects order data every hour and runs its analysis every 1–6 hours depending on your plan, alerting you when it detects an anomaly.
What Order Pulse Detects
Order Pulse uses two severity levels: Warning and Critical.
Zero Orders (Critical)
Your store has received no orders for two consecutive hours during a period where, based on your history, it should have received at least a few (an expected baseline of 3 or more). This is the highest-priority alert — it often signals a checkout issue, a payment processor outage, a broken discount code locking out cart completion, or a store configuration error.
Significant Drop (Warning, escalates to Critical)
Orders are substantially below your normal baseline for this time of day and day of week for two or more consecutive hours. Not zero, but far fewer than expected — which can indicate a broken product page, a failed promotion, or an issue affecting a specific device or location. A significant drop opens as a Warning and escalates to Critical if it persists for 6 or more consecutive low hours.
Gradual Decline (Warning)
A slower downward trend: your last 24 hours of orders total less than 60% of your trailing 7-day daily average. Each individual hour might look unremarkable, but the cumulative picture suggests something is wrong. This type of issue is the easiest to miss without automated monitoring.
How the Baseline Works
Cassian Sentinel™ learns your store's order patterns using a weighted blend:
| Data source | Weight |
|---|---|
| Same day last week, same hour | 40% |
| Same hour yesterday | 30% |
| 30-day median for the same weekday and hour | 30% |
This weighting accounts for day-of-week patterns — Tuesday is usually different from Friday, and quiet evenings are different from lunchtime. If some history is missing (a new store, for example), the remaining components are re-weighted so the baseline still works. Hour buckets are measured in UTC. The baseline adapts as your store grows.
When you connect your store, Order Pulse backfills the last 30 days of order history, so the baseline is usually established immediately. Zero-order alerts require an expected baseline of at least 3 orders in the affected hours — very quiet periods where zero orders is normal won't trigger a false alarm.
Low-volume stores
Stores averaging fewer than 5 orders per day get zero-order detection only, regardless of plan. With so few orders, drop and decline percentages are statistically meaningless — a quiet afternoon would constantly trigger false alarms. Zero-order detection still catches the catastrophic case.
Alert Coverage by Plan
| Plan | What's monitored | Analysis frequency |
|---|---|---|
| Inspector | Zero orders only | Every 3 hours |
| Analyst | Zero orders + significant drop | Every 6 hours |
| Protector | Full detection (including gradual decline) | Every 2 hours |
| Guardian | Full detection | Every hour |
| Prime | Full detection | Every hour |
| Enterprise | Full detection | Every hour |
| Agency | Full detection | Every 2 hours |
Order counts are collected every hour on all plans — the plan determines how often the anomaly analysis runs, and therefore how quickly an anomaly is noticed.
Revenue Impact on Alerts
Where your platform provides order revenue data, Order Pulse attaches an estimated dollar impact to drop alerts — "roughly $840 in orders below expectation" is more actionable than a percentage. Dollar estimates appear once your store has at least 14 distinct days of revenue history and at least 20 orders in a single currency over that window. Stores that don't meet those conditions (or platforms where revenue data isn't available) get count-based alerts instead.
Recovery Alerts
When your order rate returns to your normal baseline, you receive a recovery notification. You'll know the incident is over without having to check your dashboard.
Requirements
Order Pulse reads order count data via your platform's API. It works with Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, and Wix — you must connect your store's platform before enabling Order Pulse.
If you connected your store before Order Pulse was introduced, you may need to reconnect to grant the required data access. Platform connections are managed per site — go to your site's detail page under Sites to reconnect.
How to Enable Order Pulse
Connect your store's platform from your site's detail page under Sites (if not already done).
Go to Sites in the sidebar and select your store.
Click Setup.
Toggle Order Pulse to ON.
Cassian Sentinel™ backfills the last 30 days of order history and begins collecting hourly data immediately.
Where to See Order Pulse Data
Main dashboard → Order Pulse card shows:
- Current status (Healthy / Anomaly detected / Incident active)
- Recent order count sparkline (last 24 hours by hour)
- Active incident banner with details, if applicable
- Time of last check
Click the card to expand the check feed — a timestamped log of every Order Pulse check result.
Adjusting Sensitivity
Drop detection thresholds follow the site's sensitivity preset, configurable in the Alerts section of Settings:
| Preset | An hour counts as "low" when orders are below… | Consecutive low hours before alerting |
|---|---|---|
| Relaxed | 35% of expected | 3 |
| Normal (default) | 50% of expected | 2 |
| Sensitive | 65% of expected | 1 |
The numbers elsewhere on this page describe the normal preset. See Alerts & notifications for how presets, quiet hours, and acknowledging incidents work across all monitors.
Configuring Notifications
Order Pulse alerts are routed through the unified notification system. Go to Settings → Notifications to choose your delivery channels:
- Email (all plans)
- Telegram (Protector and above)
- Webhook — posts to Slack, Discord, or any HTTP endpoint (Protector and above)
You can configure which severity levels trigger each channel — for example, sending only Critical alerts to Telegram, while email receives all severity levels. During quiet hours, Warning alerts are held until the window ends; Critical alerts break through. Acknowledged or snoozed incidents don't re-notify.
Frequently Asked Questions
How does Cassian know what "normal" looks like for my store? It builds a baseline from your order history, weighted toward recent days and the same day of the week. A quiet Tuesday morning is compared to past Tuesday mornings, not to your busiest Saturday afternoon.
What if I just launched my store and have very little history? When you connect, Order Pulse backfills 30 days of history — if your store has been trading, the baseline is available immediately. For a genuinely brand-new store, zero-order alerts activate once your history shows the affected hours normally produce at least 3 orders, and drop/decline detection becomes meaningful as history accumulates.
Will Order Pulse alert during a sale when order volume spikes? No. Order Pulse detects unusual drops in orders, not unusual increases. A successful sale will exceed your baseline — no alert will fire.
Is Order Pulse connected to my payment processor? No — it reads order counts from your platform (Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, or Wix), not payment data. It detects when orders stop arriving, not the reason why. You'll need to investigate your payment processor separately if the cause is unclear.
My store was intentionally paused last night. How do I avoid a false alert? Temporarily disable Order Pulse in Sites → Setup before pausing your store. Re-enable it when your store is live again.
Can I tune how aggressive the detection is? Yes — the sensitivity preset (relaxed / normal / sensitive) is configurable per site in the Alerts section of Settings. It adjusts the drop threshold and how many consecutive low hours are required before an alert fires. Arbitrary custom percentages aren't supported; the presets scale automatically as your order volume evolves.
I'm on Inspector — I only get zero-order alerts. Is that enough? For most Inspector-plan stores, yes — zero orders is the most critical failure mode to catch. Upgrade to Analyst to add significant-drop detection, or Protector for gradual-decline detection and more frequent analysis.
An Order Pulse alert fired but my store looks fine. What happened? Check the timing: the alert captures a specific hour window. Your store may have recovered by the time you look. The Order Pulse check feed (on the main dashboard card) shows exactly which hour triggered the alert and what the expected vs actual order count was.