Notify affected buyers

Recall outreach works in explicit waves. Each wave freezes its audience, requires a successful test message, and records accepted, delivered, bounced, suppressed, failed, and ambiguous outcomes separately.

What you'll accomplish

• Resolve buyer contacts for the current affected-unit set.
• Review unreachable and suppressed recipients before sending.
• Test and start a recall notice without silently expanding its audience.
• Track delivery outcomes and unit workflow changes.

Requirements

• The recall case must be active.
• Your store must have approved access to the protected order contact fields used for recall safety communication.
• The buyer-mail provider and signed status webhook must be provisioned.
• Notice wording, reply-to address, remedy, and support route must be approved by your recall owner.

If protected contact data is unavailable, contact resolution fails soft. The case remains operational, and manual contact entry or CSV import can still be used where lawful and appropriate.

Resolve and review contacts

1. Open the active recall case and find Affected contacts.
2. Select Resolve order contacts to request names and email addresses for affected orders.
3. Review reachable, unreachable, ambiguous, and suppressed totals.
4. Add a missing contact manually or import a controlled CSV when you have a documented source.
5. Confirm that every contact is linked to the correct affected serials before composing a wave.

Serial Trail stores only the contact fields needed for the recall workflow. A contact without a usable email stays visible as unreachable; it is never counted as sent.

Compose and send a wave

1. Select Compose wave.
2. Choose the intended audience, then enter the subject, headline, instructions, remedy link, and contact line.
3. Review the frozen recipient count.
4. Send a test message to the approved test recipient.
5. Open the test message and verify sender name, reply-to address, serial list, public-page link, remedy, unsubscribe link, and mobile rendering.
6. Start the wave only after the provider accepts the test message.
7. Monitor the outcome counters. Pause or cancel the wave if the content or operational situation changes.

What success looks like

• The wave shows a frozen total that matches the reviewed audience.
• Every recipient ends in a counted, inspectable state.
• Delivered notices update the linked unit workflow without changing the affected-set definition.
• Paused or cancelled waves do not continue dispatching new recipients.
• The compliance report can reproduce the contact and wave outcome counts.

Troubleshooting

Order contacts are unreachable

Symptom: Affected orders resolve without an email address.

Likely cause: Shopify protected-customer-data access is not approved, the source order has no usable email, or the integration cannot read the historical order.

Fix: Verify the app's protected-data approval and scopes. Add a contact manually only from an authorized source.

Confirm: The contact becomes reachable and remains linked to the expected serials.

Start is disabled

Symptom: The wave cannot start.

Likely cause: The draft has not completed a successful test send.

Fix: Send the test again and wait for provider acceptance. Correct provider configuration if the test fails.

Confirm: The draft records the test timestamp and Start wave becomes available.

Counts do not equal deliveries

Symptom: The total audience is larger than the delivered count.

Likely cause: Some rows are still queued or ended as suppressed, bounced, failed, ambiguous, or unreachable.

Fix: Review the outcome breakdown. Do not resend blindly; correct the source or contact channel first.

Confirm: Every row has a terminal or intentionally paused state and the difference is explained.

Responsibility and consent

Recall notices are safety communications, not marketing campaigns. The merchant is responsible for lawful use of customer data, approved notice language, regulator coordination, suppression policy, and any required alternate contact channel.

Related articles

• Create a recall case
• Publish the public recall page
• Export the compliance report
• Show serials to buyers