An OpenCart email about a new order is easy to miss among the rest of your mail, and nobody keeps the store admin open all day. Telegram is usually open on your phone anyway — so the simplest option is to have the store write there. Here is how to do it with the free AirNotifier module.
What arrives in Telegram
- New order — number, total, customer, phone, shipping, payment, products and comment, plus a link to the order in the admin.
- Status change — only for the statuses you choose, together with the change comment.
- Reviews and questions — product reviews and ocStore blog comments with a link to moderation.
- Contact form — the message arrives only after the form is successfully submitted, captcha included.
The message language can be chosen separately — Ukrainian, English or Russian — regardless of the store languages.
How to connect it: four steps
You don’t need to create your own Telegram bot: notifications are sent by the @AirAlarmer_Bot bot.
- Upload
airnotifier.ocmod.zipin “Extensions → Installer” (on OpenCart 4.1.x, click “Install” next to the archive). - In “Extensions → Modules”, install AirNotifier and open its settings.
- Open @AirAlarmer_Bot in Telegram, press “Start” and send
/key— the bot will reply with your key. - Paste the key, choose triggers and save — a test message will arrive in Telegram.
Notifications for the whole team
If several people handle orders, add the bot to your work group and send /key there — the key will be bound to the group. You can add up to 10 keys in total: managers’ personal chats and groups. Every notification goes to all of them.
Will it hurt the store?
- Checkout is not slowed down. Messages are sent after the customer has already received the page. If Telegram is temporarily unavailable, the store works as usual and the error is written to the OpenCart error log.
- OpenCart files are not modified. The module works through standard OpenCart events; when it is removed, its events are removed too.
- No false “new orders”. When a manager edits an existing order in the admin, the module doesn’t mistake it for a new one.
- Flood protection. For reviews and the contact form — no more than 15 notifications per 10 minutes and 3 from a single IP address. Orders are never limited.
All the hosting needs is outgoing HTTPS connections (cURL or allow_url_fopen).
If your key falls into the wrong hands
Send /revoke to the bot — the old key will stop working. Get a new one with the /key command and paste it into the module settings.
Compatibility
AirNotifier works with OpenCart 2.3, 3.x, 4.1.x and ocStore 3, PHP 5.6–8.x. The module is free: the archive and a license key for your domain appear in your account right after checkout.