E-commerce
Push notification best practices for e-commerce stores
How often to send, what subscribers signed up for, what holds their attention and the mistake that loses it, for e-commerce stores.
Updated · By the SharePush team
- Usual cadence
- 2–4 campaigns a week
- How solid this is
- Industry guidance Agency and vendor guidance, consistent across sources but based on self-selected customers. Treat as a starting band, not a benchmark.
What do people expect from push notifications on e-commerce stores?
They opted in to be told when something changes for them: a price, a restock, an order. A catalogue they could browse any time is not that.
How often should e-commerce stores send push notifications?
The usual band is 2–4 campaigns a week. Agency guidance converges on 2–4 promotional sends a week. It is consistent advice, but it is vendor guidance rather than independent research.
That band is a starting point, not a target. Your own click rate is the better judge: it moves before the unsubscribes do.
What works on e-commerce stores
- Triggered beats broadcast: price drop, back in stock and order status earn their interruption because the person asked for that thing.
- Cap the promotional sends and spend the headroom on triggered ones: they are a different budget.
- A discount in every title teaches people to wait for the discount.
- Tie the send to something the person did, not to your campaign calendar.
What is the most common push notification mistake on e-commerce stores?
Discount fatigue. When every send is a sale, the sale stops being news and the margin goes with it.
The rules every site shares
Your sector changes the volume, not the rules. Chrome runs three systems against every site that sends web push (on-device spam warnings, automatic permission revocation and push API rate limits), and the same five habits keep you clear of all of them.
- Earn the permission before you ask for it The prompt itself is scored. A low acceptance rate pushes you into Chrome’s quieter UI and counts against you in the rate-limit formula.
- Treat volume as a budget, not a lever Volume is only half of every Chrome penalty: the other half is time spent on your site. Five pushes a day is fine for a daily-visit audience and disruptive for a once-a-month one.
- Write copy the classifier does not flag The model reads your title, body and buttons. It was trained largely on synthetic examples, so it is unpredictable: write like a newsroom, not like an ad.
- Send to the people who asked for that thing Relevance is the only input you fully control that raises engagement and lowers volume at once. It fixes both sides of the ratio Chrome measures.
- Prune before Chrome prunes you A dead subscriber is not neutral. They are the denominator dragging your engagement ratio under the revocation threshold, and they take the live subscribers down with them.