Shopware customer service: answer order status and tracking questions in chat without switching to the backend

It's Monday morning, 20 new messages are waiting, and a good share of them ask: Where is my order? For every reply, you look up the order in the Shopware Administration, copy the tracking number and check it with the carrier. One at a time, that's quick. Added up, they eat the whole morning.

Here's how to count these questions for a week, which Shopware 6 settings make them less frequent and how to answer the rest safely in chat.

Count for 7 days before you change anything

This problem isn't new. Back in 2016, a store selling chalk paint complained in the German Shopware forum that customers kept asking "Where's my parcel?" despite the delivery time in the order confirmation and a status email. The post went on: "it just takes up a lot of time" (Shopware Community Forum).

Online, you'll read that 30 to 50 percent of all support requests are order status questions. There's no source for that figure that you can check. Our WISMO guide explains why and walks through the full method for measuring it.

The short version for your store

1. For one week, add a label such as "Order status" to every conversation where someone asks where an order is or when it will arrive.
2. Give each of these conversations a second label for the reason, taken from the table below.
3. Write down how many orders you shipped that same week.
4. On day 8, work out the order status questions per 100 shipped orders and the hours they cost (number of conversations times your average minutes per conversation).

What's behind the question

The number per 100 orders is the more honest one. The share of all conversations jumps as soon as something else gets loud, such as a broken discount code.

A tally sheet next to your keyboard is all you need to count. In Deskwoot, you filter the reports by label and to the last 7 days (on every paid plan).

What Shopware can do on its own to cut the questions

You can shrink the first two reasons in the table, "Not shipped yet" and "No link", in Shopware itself, without any extra software.

A delivery time the customer sees before buying

Every shipping method in Shopware has a Delivery time field, which shows up when the customer picks a shipping method. If you give a product its own delivery time, it overrides the one on the shipping method, according to the Shopware documentation.

Set it especially for items you still need to restock. For the delivery time to show in the cart by default, the option "Show delivery time in cart" has to be switched on in the shopping cart settings.

That won't make the questions go away completely, as the chalk paint store from 2016 shows.

A tracking URL on every shipping method

Here's how the Shopware documentation describes it:

1. In the Shopware Administration, open Settings and then Shipping.
2. For each shipping method, enter the address of your carrier's tracking page in the Tracking URL field.
3. In that address, put the placeholder %s "instead of the actual tracking number".

Shopware then fills in the code from the order details for each order. Without the URL, the customer gets a number they can't do anything with, and they write to you.

Send the shipping email with the Flow Builder, and test it once for real

The Flow Builder has a trigger that fires "when an order delivery enters status 'Shipped'" and an action called "Send mail". With these, the shipping email goes out as soon as someone in the warehouse sets the status.

Check it with a real test order, all the way to your own inbox. Merchants in the Shopware forum report these cases:

• Tracking numbers in the mail template for the delivery status "Shipped" stayed empty or showed up as "Array", first on 6.4.19 and again in 2024 on 6.5.8.6 (forum thread).
• When several orders were changed at once, no emails went out as long as the checkbox for status emails was left unticked, according to a 2023 thread (forum thread).

These are reports from individual users, not an official list of bugs. Your test order shows whether they affect your store, because you get exactly the email your customers get.

Guest orders have an expiry date

Customers who check out as guests see their order through a link in the order confirmation. Shopware only lets them in with the email address and the postal code of the billing address.

By default, that only works for orders created or changed in the last 30 days (Shopware source code). According to the Shopware feedback portal, you can configure that period from version 6.7.10.0 onward.

Otherwise, on preorders with a long delivery time, a guest sooner or later can't find their order anymore and ends up in your inbox.

Shopware has no "delivered" status

In Shopware, a delivery can be open, shipped, partially shipped, returned, partially returned or cancelled. By default, there's no status for delivered (Shopware developer documentation).

So "shipped" only means the parcel has left your warehouse. Only the carrier knows whether it arrived.

Parcels really do get lost

In 2025, the postal conciliation body at the Bundesnetzagentur, Germany's Federal Network Agency, received 4,804 requests for conciliation. About 75 percent of them were about problems with parcel delivery, and in well over half of the cases the issue was loss (Bundesnetzagentur).

Complaints about postal services in Germany rose from 44,406 in 2024 to 55,395 in 2025, letters and parcels combined (Bundesnetzagentur data portal).

So don't write "arrived" in the chat until the carrier reports the parcel as delivered. If the customer still says nothing came, you need a person who follows up with the carrier and decides whether you send the order again.

After 2 weeks: count again

Keep the labels going after you've made the changes in Shopware. After 2 weeks, compare the order status questions per 100 orders with your first week.

• If "No link" drops, the tracking URL did its job.
• If "Not shipped yet" stays high, your shipping time is in the wrong place or missing from your store altogether.

What you can say in chat before you know who's writing

Anyone can type in a name and an order number. Shopware itself asks guests for an email address and postal code before it shows their order, and the same logic works in chat:

• The order number plus the postal code of the delivery address are enough for the status and the tracking link.
• Only share items, amounts and the address once you know this person placed the order. You know that, for example, when they write from the email address on the order.

Why this is also a data protection question

For stores in the EU, Art. 5(1)(f) GDPR requires "appropriate security" of personal data, "including protection against unauthorised or unlawful processing".

Art. 4(12) GDPR calls a breach of security that leads to the unauthorized disclosure of personal data a personal data breach (GDPR text published by Germany's Federal Commissioner for Data Protection, in German). Sending a delivery address to the wrong person can count as one.

Outside the EU, other laws apply, but the same caution still makes sense. This is general information, not legal advice.

Pay by invoice: payment open, parcel on its way

One more quirk from the DACH region (Germany, Austria and Switzerland): when customers buy on invoice, Shopware often still shows the payment as open while the delivery shipped long ago. That's normal.

If you mention the open payment in chat without explaining it, the customer may well write straight back to ask whether something is wrong with their order.

Answering order status questions in chat with Deskwoot and Shopware 6

Deskwoot is our own product. It reads orders from Shopware 6.5 and newer and never changes anything there (here's how to set it up).

What your team sees next to the chat

Next to every conversation, you see up to 10 orders for the customer's email address, with status, payment, delivery, items, tracking number, delivery address and "Open in Shopware". For most questions, that means no more searching in the Administration.

What Fynn answers on his own

Fynn, our AI agent, answers order questions on the Startup plan and up, following the same rules as above. Every conversation with him counts as an AI conversation.

• To share the status and tracking link, he only needs the order number and the postal code of the delivery address. After 3 wrong attempts, he stops looking up orders in that conversation for 15 minutes.
• He only shares items and totals after the customer clicks the link he sends to their email address. He can then talk about their 5 most recent orders.
• He only says a parcel "arrived" when Ship24 reports it as delivered (Ship24 says it covers over 1,500 carriers). He never calls an open payment on a shipped order a problem.
• He hands cancellations, refunds, returns and changes to the address or payment over to your team.

What it costs

Try it with your own store

Create an account and connect Shopware under Settings > Integrations. New and changed orders show up within 5 minutes.

Your first 7 days run on Enterprise, with no credit card and up to 30 seats, yours included. After that, the free Hacker plan is enough for orders next to the chat. You'll find every plan on the pricing page.