How Alerts Work
How Alerts Work
SellerOps monitors your TikTok Shop orders continuously. When an order’s dispatch deadline approaches, alerts fire at three escalation stages. Each stage increases in urgency, ensuring you have multiple opportunities to ship before TikTok marks the order as late.
Alert Escalation Stages
| Alert | Timing | Urgency | Watcher Channel | Defender Behavior |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| T-24 | 24 hours before deadline | Low | Optional Slack routing; quiet-hours suppression can be applied to Slack | |
| T-12 | 12 hours before deadline | Medium | Optional Slack routing; quiet-hours suppression can be applied to Slack | |
| T-4 | 4 hours before deadline | Critical | Optional Slack routing; critical path remains unsuppressed |
T-24 Alert: Early Heads-Up
Fires 24 hours before the dispatch deadline. This is your planning window. Use it to identify orders that need to be packed and shipped the next day.
T-12 Alert: Increased Urgency
Fires 12 hours before the dispatch deadline. If you haven’t acted on the T-24 alert, this is your second chance. At this stage, the order should be actively in your fulfillment pipeline.
T-4 Alert: Critical
Fires 4 hours before the dispatch deadline. This is the final warning before likely late dispatch. If you receive a T-4 alert, ship immediately.
A late order impacts your Late Dispatch Rate (LDR), the percentage of orders shipped past TikTok’s deadline. TikTok policy frameworks can change by market and over time, so always validate current enforcement details in TikTok Seller Center.
Alert Routing
Watcher uses email as the active notification channel for T-24, T-12, and T-4 alerts.
Defender adds channel routing controls (including Slack). In that mode, each alert type can be configured separately.
- Email: Baseline delivery channel for Watcher alerts.
- Slack: Defender add-on feature.
See Configuring Alert Rules for detailed setup instructions.
Quiet Hours
Quiet hours are a Defender-level routing control. In current implementation, quiet hours are used to suppress non-critical Slack noise windows, while email remains the baseline channel.
Quiet-hours rules are configured as an hourly window (for example, 10 PM to 7 AM) and apply to:
- T-24 and T-12 non-critical channel suppression behavior in Defender routing.
- T-4 critical path remains unsuppressed.
Quiet-hours controls appear in Settings only when Defender routing is enabled.
Near-Miss Orders
A near-miss is an order shipped within 4 hours of the TikTok dispatch deadline. These orders were not late, but they were close. Watcher tracks near-misses because they indicate fulfillment risk. A pattern of near-misses often precedes actual late orders.
Your dashboard stats card shows near-misses prevented over a 7-day rolling window.
Alert Tracking
Watcher tracks alert delivery for each order using stage-specific timestamps:
t24_sent_at: Timestamp when the T-24 alert was sent.t12_sent_at: Timestamp when the T-12 alert was sent.t4_sent_at: Timestamp when the T-4 alert was sent.
The dashboard stats card then aggregates alert totals (for example alerts_sent_t24, alerts_sent_t12, alerts_sent_t4) and near-miss prevention trends over a 7-day rolling window.