Byte8 PingBell
A free, MIT-licensed Magento 2 module that bridges five core store events into PingBell, so your phone (or desktop, or watch) buzzes the moment something matters happens — without waiting for a transactional email or refreshing the admin dashboard.
What it sends
Out of the box, every one of these Magento events can fire a PingBell notification:
| Event | Magento trigger |
|---|---|
| New order | sales_order_place_after |
| New invoice | sales_order_invoice_save_after |
| New shipment | sales_order_shipment_save_after |
| New credit memo | sales_order_creditmemo_save_after |
| New customer registration | customer_register_success |
Each event routes to its own PingBell ID, so you can split: orders to your phone, refunds to a finance team bell, customer signups to a Slack-bridged bell. Leave a PingBell ID empty and that event is silently skipped — it's not a binary on/off for the whole module.
Why this exists
Magento has had transactional email for fifteen years. It works fine if your operations team checks email. It does not work for:
- Low-volume / high-value stores — if every order is the difference between a quiet afternoon and a busy one, you want to know about it inside ten seconds, not wait for SMTP and Outlook's junk filter.
- Phone-first owners — the merchant who's on the warehouse floor, on the road, or doing photography. They don't sit refreshing Magento admin.
- Dispatch / finance / customer-service split — where the same human shouldn't get every notification, and email-rule routing is fragile.
- Smartwatch users — a buzz on the wrist beats a dashboard tab every time.
PingBell is the right shape for this — push-based, multi-device, low-noise. This module is the bridge.
Why this is not
- Not a replacement for transactional email. Customers still get invoices, dispatch confirmations and refund emails as Magento normally sends them. PingBell is for staff, not buyers.
- Not a marketing tool. No drip campaigns, no abandoned-cart funnels. Operational notifications only — five event types.
- Not a queue. Each event triggers one HTTP request to pingbell.io with a 5-second timeout. If pingbell.io is down, the notification is lost — but the underlying Magento checkout / invoice / refund still completes perfectly. No silent retries, no DB queue, no extra moving parts.
Where to start
If you've never installed the module, head to the Quick start — Composer install, paste an API key, click Fetch Bells, place a test order.
If you're integrating into an existing PingBell account with several bells already configured, the per-event configuration page shows how the Fetch Bells button auto-populates your IDs.
If you're a developer planning to add a custom event (e.g. fire a
PingBell when a customer_save_commit_after happens), the
Extending page walks through the virtualType
pattern — it's a single new entry in di.xml plus an event observer.
License & support
MIT. Free forever. The codebase is intentionally tiny (one observer, one HTTP client, one config — under 500 lines of PHP) so it's easy to read, audit and extend. Issues and PRs welcome on GitHub.