Orders-gone-quiet warning

A checkout that stops working rarely announces itself: the first sign is that orders stop. Once a day, Commerce Health looks at the dates of your recent orders, and when a steady store has gone quiet for much longer than usual, it warns you.

The rule

1. The store must be steady. It needs at least 14 orders in the week before its most recent order. A smaller store never gets this warning, because a gap between orders is normal for it.
2. Work out the usual gap. 7 days divided by the orders in that week. 28 orders in a week is one about every 6 hours.
3. Warn after 5 usual gaps, and never before 12 hours.

The usual gap is worked out from the week before the last order, not the last 7 days, so a long quiet spell cannot dilute its own baseline.

What you see and get

• On screen. The Overview screen shows “Orders have gone quiet” with how long it has been and how often the store usually gets an order. The Dashboard widget shows the same message.
• One email with the subject “[Your site] No orders for a while, please check your checkout”. It says this may be normal, such as a quiet day or a finished sale, and can also mean customers cannot check out or pay, and suggests three steps: place a test order, check your payment provider for errors or held payments, and run a scan.
• A second email with the subject “[Your site] Orders are coming in again” when a new order arrives. No action is needed.

You are emailed once per quiet period, not every day. The check runs once a day at about 9:00 site time, so the email can arrive up to a day after orders stop.

Turn the emails off

Open Commerce Health → Settings and turn off Email me when orders go quiet. That stops the daily check and both emails. The figures on the Overview screen and the Dashboard widget still show the warning when the rule is met. The emails go to your alert recipients.

What it cannot tell you

• A quiet period is not always a problem. A finished sale, a holiday or an outage on a marketing channel can look the same.
• It reads order dates only, so it cannot say why orders stopped. Use Test order and your payment provider’s dashboard to look for the cause.
• It counts orders that went through (Processing, Completed, On hold), as Store activity does. Test orders are never counted.
• It is not a diagnostic and does not affect your health score. It keeps running when PRO is active.