Your Status Pipeline
Order statuses are the stages an order moves through. Every shop is created with nine of them, in this order:
- Quote
- Pending
- Approved
- In Production
- Ready
- Shipped
- Delivered
- Feedback
- Cancelled
Manage them under Settings → Order Statuses. You can rename any status, change its color and icon, add a tooltip description, drag them into a different order, and add statuses of your own.
System Statuses Cannot Be Deleted
All nine statuses your shop starts with are system statuses. They carry a System badge and their delete button is greyed out. You can rename them, recolor them, re-icon them and reorder them, but you cannot remove them.
Statuses you add yourself can be deleted — but only while no order is using them. If any order sits in that status, deleting it fails with a message telling you how many orders to reassign first.
renaming a status changes only the label your team sees. Behind each status is a fixed internal slug (pending, confirmed, in-production, ready, shipped, and so on) that was set when the status was created, and renaming from this page does not change it. Automation keys off the slug, not the name, so renaming "Ready" to "Ready for Pickup" keeps all of its existing behaviour.
Add a Status
- Type a name into the New status name field at the bottom of the pipeline.
- Pick a color from the quick swatches or the color picker.
- Select Add Status.
- The new status is appended to the end of the pipeline. Drag it into position, then use Save Order.
Names must be unique — adding a status whose name matches an existing one is rejected.
Choose a Color and Icon
Each status can have a color and one of sixteen icons: circle, clock, check circle, x circle, package, truck, home, file text, shopping cart, pause, play, ban, flag, zap, star and alert triangle. A preview badge next to each row shows how it will look on an order.
Reorder the Pipeline
- Grab the drag handle at the left of a status row.
- Drag it up or down.
- Select Save Order to store the new sequence.
The order you set here matters beyond appearance. Drip Merch auto-advances orders forward only — it compares the position of the target status to the order's current position and will not move an order backwards. Putting your statuses in the real sequence of your workflow is what makes that work.
The Star Does Not Set a Starting Status
Each row has a star button, and the on-screen help says the starred status is assigned to new orders. That is not what happens.
- Nothing in Drip Merch reads the starred status when an order is created.
- Storefront checkout always creates orders in Pending, whatever is starred.
- Orders you create by hand start in Pending, or in Confirmed if they are already marked paid.
- An order created from an invoice starts in Confirmed.
starring a status has no effect on where new orders land. If you want new orders to appear somewhere other than Pending, you cannot do that from this page — move them manually, or rename Pending to whatever you call that first stage.
The Reset Button Does Nothing
The Reset button at the top of the page asks you to confirm that all statuses will be reset to defaults, and then does nothing at all. It simply reloads the list. There is no way to restore the original nine statuses from this page, so no work is lost if you press it by accident — but no work is undone either.
Automatic Customer Emails
Any status can send the customer an email when an order reaches it.
- Open the email section for that status and enable Send email when order reaches this status.
- Enter a subject and a body.
- Insert variables by clicking them:
{{customer_name}},{{customer_first_name}},{{customer_last_name}},{{customer_email}},{{order_number}},{{order_total}},{{order_date}},{{status_name}},{{shop_name}},{{tracking_number}}and{{tracking_url}}. - Save.
If you enable email but leave the subject or body blank, Drip Merch falls back to your shop's saved email template for that status and uses that instead.
Automatic Customer Texts
Any status can also send an SMS.
- Enable SMS for the status and write a short message body.
- SMS supports
{{customer_name}},{{customer_first_name}},{{order_number}},{{status_name}},{{company_name}},{{due_date}},{{tracking_url}}and{{pickup_or_shipping_details}}. - If you enable SMS but leave the body blank, your shop's saved text template for that status is used.
A text is only sent when all three of these are true: SMS is enabled on the status, the customer record has a phone number, and that customer has opted in to SMS. Customers who have not opted in are silently skipped.
When Notifications Actually Fire
This is the part that surprises people most. Customer emails and texts are sent only when the status changes in one of two ways:
- Someone changes the status from the order's edit screen in the dashboard.
- ShipStation tracking sync moves the order to Shipped or Delivered.
They are not sent when:
- An order is first created, whether from storefront checkout, by hand, or from an invoice.
- Drip Merch auto-advances an order to In Production or Ready because of production or purchase-order activity. That advance changes the status silently.
- Someone moves a job on the production board. Those changes alert shop owners, not the customer.
if a customer says they never got the "your order is in production" email, check how the status changed. If production activity advanced it automatically, no email was sent. Re-setting the status by hand from the order edit screen will send it.