SMS Is Not Dead: The Highest-Delivery Channel in E-commerce, If You Use It Right

Many brand e-commerce operators treat SMS as a relic: "Who reads text messages anymore? Everyone's on LINE." Our own experience taking orders every day says exactly the opposite — SMS is our most reliably delivered channel, period. A LINE message only arrives if the person has added you as a friend and hasn't blocked you; email lands in the junk folder more often every year; only SMS, as long as the number is right, shows up on the recipient's notification bar nearly one hundred percent of the time.

The question was never whether SMS works — it's that most people use it wrong. At roughly NT$0.7 per message, spraying your entire list feels expensive, of course. Aimed at the right person, at the right moment, with one right sentence, it's one of the best-ROI tools across every channel.

What SMS Should Do: Three Scenarios That Are Actually Worth It

1. Transactional Notifications: An Obligation, Not Marketing

Shipping notifications, convenience-store arrival alerts, cash-on-delivery reminders — open rates on these approach one hundred percent, because the customer is waiting for them. Convenience-store pickup (7-Eleven/FamilyMart) especially: a package not collected within seven days gets returned, and one message — "Your package has arrived at the OO store, please pick it up by X" — directly cuts the no-pickup rate. The cost of an uncollected package is round-trip shipping plus restocking labor; one SMS that prevents one failed pickup pays for itself a hundred times over.

2. Winning Back Dormant Customers: Segment the List, Say Less

A customer who hasn't repurchased in ninety-plus days has probably long since blocked you on LINE — SMS is the last line still open. But the cardinal sin of a win-back message is writing it like an ad flyer. Our approach: only message dormant customers who have repurchased at least twice, because these people already liked you — they just forgot you. Customers who vanished after a single first purchase are usually not worth the win-back cost.

3. Campaign Reminders: Send Before Launch, Not After

For major campaigns, send SMS one to two days before the event starts, and make it a "preview," not a sales pitch. Our campaign engine runs a warm-up countdown, and SMS follows that rhythm: one message to high-value members during warm-up, then a follow-up on launch morning — only to those who responded. The full list gets one message; only responders get a second. That's the key to controlling both cost and annoyance.

Practical Details You Only Learn by Stepping on Them

• 70 characters is the boundary of one message. Go over and you're billed for two — and nobody finishes a long text anyway. One sentence: who you are, what's happening, what to do.
• Short links must be trackable. Use a short-link service on your own domain — you capture click data, and customers are more willing to tap a familiar domain. These days an unfamiliar short link is one step away from looking like a scam.
• Brand name goes first. Taiwan is flooded with one-page scam texts; a message that doesn't open with your brand name gets deleted as fraud no matter how good the offer.
• Always include an opt-out. It's not just a legal requirement — it's a filter for list health. People who opt out weren't going to buy; keeping them just wastes NT$0.7 per send.

The value of SMS isn't that it's cheap — it's that it will definitely be seen. So every message has to earn that privilege: if there's no clear reason to send it, don't send it at all.

How SMS and LINE Divide the Work

It's not either-or. Our division of labor: LINE handles day-to-day engagement and segmented marketing — richer content, higher frequency; see our post on integrating a LINE Official Account with e-commerce. SMS handles "must-arrive messages" — transactional notifications, pickup reminders, and a few major campaigns a year. Wherever LINE can't reach (not friended, or blocked), SMS fills the gap.

Pulling this off requires a system that ties together order status, member tags, and send history — not exporting Excel and pasting it into an SMS platform every time. That's why notification infrastructure is standard in our e-commerce builds: channels will change, but "the right person, the right moment, the right sentence" will always need a system behind it.

Back to the opening question: who still reads SMS? The answer — everyone does; they just only read the few messages that concern them. Make your messages those few, and NT$0.7 buys the cheapest attention in the room.