Order Pulse
Hourly order monitoring that alerts you when your store stops converting — before you notice it yourself.
Order Pulse is part of Cassian Sentinel™. It monitors your store's hourly order counts and alerts you when something unusual happens — 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 checks every hour and alerts you within 60 minutes of detecting an anomaly.
What Order Pulse Detects
Zero Orders (Critical)
Your store has received no orders during a period where, based on your history, you normally would. 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 (High)
Orders are substantially below your normal baseline for this time of day and day of week. 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.
Gradual Decline (Medium)
A slower downward trend across multiple hours. 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 average:
| Data source | Weight |
|---|---|
| Same day last week | 40% |
| Yesterday | 30% |
| 30-day median | 30% |
This weighting accounts for day-of-week patterns — Tuesday is usually different from Friday, and quiet evenings are different from lunchtime. The baseline adapts as your store grows.
Order Pulse needs at least 7 days of order history to establish a reliable baseline. During this warm-up period, it still alerts on zero orders from day one.
Alert Coverage by Plan
| Plan | What's monitored | Check frequency |
|---|---|---|
| Inspector | Zero orders (Critical) only | Every 6 hours |
| Analyst | Full detection | Every 6 hours |
| Protector | Full detection | Every 2 hours |
| Guardian | Full detection | Every hour |
| Prime | Full detection | Every hour |
| Enterprise | Full detection | Every hour |
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 the Shopify API. You must connect your Shopify store before enabling Order Pulse.
If you connected your Shopify store before Order Pulse was introduced, you may need to reconnect to grant the required data access. Go to Settings → Shopify → Reconnect.
How to Enable Order Pulse
Connect your Shopify store in Settings → Shopify (if not already done).
Go to Sites in the sidebar and select your store.
Click Setup.
Toggle Order Pulse to ON.
Cassian Sentinel™ begins collecting order data immediately. Baseline establishment takes 7 days of order history.
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.
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.
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? Order Pulse still alerts on zero orders from day one — the most critical scenario doesn't require a baseline. Full anomaly detection (significant drop, gradual decline) activates after 7 days of data.
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 Shopify, 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 set a custom threshold — for example, only alert if orders drop by more than 70%? Not currently. Thresholds are automatically calculated from your store's history to stay relevant as your order volume evolves. Custom thresholds are on the roadmap.
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 for full anomaly detection and more frequent checks.
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.