What's new in Staff Ping

Meta published a new WhatsApp Business API rate card effective July 1, 2026, and Staff Ping's per-message pricing now follows it.

The main change: six markets that were previously billed under a regional grouping now have their own standalone rates — Hong Kong and Singapore (formerly Rest of Asia Pacific), Hungary, Poland, and Romania (formerly Rest of Central & Eastern Europe), and Qatar (formerly Rest of Middle East). If you send order notifications to recipients in these countries, their per-message rate is now country-specific rather than the grouping rate.

All other regions' utility rates are unchanged. The full table is on the pricing page.

If your store has multiple locations, order alerts can now go to the branch that actually has to act on the order — instead of every phone buzzing for everything.

Create one ping per branch and add a Branch Location rule with the location's name exactly as it appears under Settings → Locations in your Shopify admin. Then:

• Pickup orders (Shopify local pickup) alert the branch the customer chose at checkout — instantly.
• Delivery orders alert the branch Shopify assigns to fulfill the order. Shopify makes that call moments after checkout (based on your inventory, routing rules, and distance), so the alert arrives seconds later — routed to the right team.

The message itself got smarter too: for pickup orders, the Address line now shows the pickup branch — e.g. Store pickup (Main Street Branch) — instead of "N/A".

Two practical notes:

• You may have seen a permission request when opening Staff Ping recently — delivery routing needs to read Shopify's fulfillment assignment. Approving it enables the feature; everything else works the same either way.
• If an order alerts a branch you didn't expect, the alert mirrored Shopify's own routing decision — check that location's inventory and your rules under Settings → Shipping and delivery → Order routing.

Matching is exact ("Main Street" never matches "Main Street 2"), and orders that match no branch ping still trigger your unfiltered pings — nothing goes unannounced.

Two fixes that make the free plan behave the way you'd expect:

• Test messages don't count anymore. Sending yourself a test from the ping form no longer uses up one of your 50 lifetime messages. We recalculated every store's counter — if you were close to the limit, you may have noticed headroom come back.
• Disabled pings are fully off. Turning a ping off used to leave "Upgrade Required" entries in your logs for orders that would have matched — even with plenty of messages remaining. Disabled now means silent, and that label only appears when the limit is genuinely reached.

Pings can now match on the actual collections or products in an order, not just SKUs and tags.

Add a new rule, choose Collection or Product as the field, and Shopify's native Resource Picker opens with your store's data — search, filter, multi-select, exactly the same picker you use elsewhere in the admin. Save the ping and orders containing those collections or products will trigger the notification.

Useful for merchants whose product catalog spans different fulfillment workflows — e.g. one staff group for items shipped from your main warehouse and another for items dropshipped from a supplier. Same idea works for high-value collections, fragile items, made-to-order pieces, anything where the right team needs to know based on what's in the order.

Collection membership is checked live against Shopify when each order comes in, so moving a product into or out of a collection takes effect immediately — no caching, no syncing on your side.

WhatsApp messages sent inside Meta's free service window (24 hours after a customer message) aren't charged. Now you can see exactly which messages were billed and which were free.

Available on Starter and Pro plans.

If a WhatsApp message fails (bad number, Meta transient error, template paused), you can now retry it directly from the Logs page without re-triggering the order event.

The button shows the number of retries inline (e.g. "Resend (2)") so you know how many times you've already tried.

Previously, alerts showed something like 6cpcdp-rt.myshopify.com. Now they show "Acme Coffee" — the real name from your Shopify settings.

This applies to all new messages. Existing scheduled pings will automatically pick up the change.

If you manage your store from your phone, the StaffPing admin should now feel native. Tables stack into cards, filters wrap cleanly, and forms are thumb-reachable.

Meta occasionally returns a transient #131000 error when their API hiccups. These messages used to land in your Failed bucket and require a manual resend. They're now retried automatically with exponential backoff.

Permanent errors (invalid phone, paused template, opt-out) still won't retry — those need real action.