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Quiet hours for texts

A text goes out when it is a decent hour where the person is. Not where your store is, and not where you are. If your campaign starts at 9am in New York, somebody in California does not get it at 6am their time. They get it later that morning.

This is for texts only. Email is not held back for the hour.

Whose hours decide

Two sets of hours, and a text goes out only when both allow it.

• Yours. Send between, on the Settings tab of Settings → Text messages. It starts at 11am to 8pm, and you can change it.
• The law's. Each state sets its own. Most allow texts from 8am to 9pm. Some stop at 8pm. Texas starts at 9am, and at noon on Sundays.

Your hours are applied inside the law's. Widening yours never widens theirs: if you choose 7am, somebody in a state that starts at 8am still gets their text at 8am. Narrowing yours works exactly as you would expect.

Both are read in the person's own local time. Your store's time zone plays no part.

If your hours and a state's hours never meet — say you chose 9pm to 11pm, in a state where texts stop at 8pm — nobody in that state can be texted. Their texts wait. Pick hours that leave some daytime.

How we know where somebody is

From what your store already holds about them: the address on their customer record, where their visits to your store come from, or a location that came in with an import. What matters is the state they are in.

If we do not know, the text waits. We will not guess, because a wrong guess is a text at six in the morning.

On a text campaign, these people are counted on their own line, Held: no location. If we learn where they are before the campaign runs out of time, they get the text. A campaign has three days from the moment it starts; anyone still waiting after that is not texted from it.

Other things that make a text wait

• One marketing text a day. Each person gets at most one marketing text from your store in any 24 hours. A second one waits until the day has passed. A text campaign has a switch beside When, Ignore the one-text-a-day limit, for the times you mean to send a second one.
• Some states limit texts per phone number. A few states cap how many marketing texts one number may get in a day. A text over the cap waits until the next one is allowed.

A text that waits is not lost. It goes the moment the hour, the day or the cap allows, as long as the campaign still has time.

What does not wait

• The six-digit code somebody asked for on one of your forms. They are on your page right now, waiting for it, so it goes straight away at any hour.
• The confirmation after STOP, when your number sends one. Somebody who asked to stop hears back straight away.

A reply you type in Conversations does wait for the hour. If it is too late where they are, the reply box says so and tells you when to try again.