Anomaly Alerts for E-commerce
Get proactive alerts when your store deviates from baseline - revenue drops, ROAS shifts, sync failures, and credential expirations - without watching dashboards all day.
Anomaly Alerts
Anomaly alerts are proactive notifications surfaced when MerchantFlow detects that yesterday's revenue, ad spend, or ROAS deviated meaningfully from its recent baseline. They show up in the in-app Notifications dropdown and, depending on your settings, arrive by email so issues catch your eye before they become problems.
Plan availability: Anomaly alerts are included on the Pro and Plus tiers. Starter workspaces do not receive anomaly alerts. See Pricing Plans.
What Triggers an Alert
The anomaly engine sweeps tenant data every six hours and fires exactly four alert types:
| Alert type | Fires when |
|---|---|
| Revenue drop | Yesterday's net revenue is more than 30% below the 7-day average |
| Ad spend spike | Yesterday's ad spend is more than 30% above the 7-day average |
| Ad spend drop | Yesterday's ad spend is more than 30% below the 7-day average |
| ROAS collapse | Yesterday's blended ROAS (net revenue / ad spend) is more than 30% below the 7-day average |
Two noise floors stop tiny numbers generating alerts: the 7-day average ad spend must be at least $10, and the 7-day average revenue at least $50. ROAS collapse additionally requires at least $10 of spend yesterday and at least two usable baseline days.
Revenue is monitored for drops only - a revenue increase never fires an alert.
Sync failures, expiring credentials, COGS coverage, and unfulfilled-order backlogs are not anomaly alerts. Sync and integration events arrive as their own notification types, and order-status issues appear in the Order status alerts section of the Daily Email Summary.
Where Alerts Appear
Anomaly alerts surface in two places:
- In-app notifications dropdown in the dashboard header (bell icon) - see Notifications. Every alert lands here regardless of your email settings.
- Email - critical alerts send immediately; warnings batch into a morning digest in your store timezone. Email delivery is what the settings below control.
There is no dedicated anomalies page in the dashboard.
How Detection Works
The engine loads the last 8 complete days in your store timezone. Yesterday is compared against the arithmetic mean of the 7 days before it:
deviation = (yesterday - 7-day average) / 7-day averageA deviation of more than 30% in the alerting direction opens an alert. This is a plain percentage-versus-rolling-mean test - there is no z-score, no seasonality model, and no day-of-week baseline.
Severity
Every alert is scored, and the score decides its severity:
score = (deviation % / 30) x duration multiplier x impact multiplier- Duration multiplier grows the longer an alert stays open: 1.3x after 12 hours, 1.7x after 24 hours, 2.5x after 48 hours
- Impact multiplier is the revenue affected divided by your median daily revenue over the trailing 30 days, capped at 3.0x
| Score | Severity |
|---|---|
| 3.0 or higher | Critical |
| 1.5 to 3.0 | Warning |
| Below 1.5 | Info |
Three adjustments then apply: a warning open for more than 48 hours is auto-escalated to critical; an alert affecting less than 2% of your median daily revenue is downgraded one level; and a brand-new alert the detector rated critical is never filed lower than warning.
Lifecycle
An alert becomes persistent after 24 hours and resolves automatically once it has not re-fired for 36 hours. Re-detections inside a 24-hour window are de-duplicated rather than creating a new alert. A resolved-notification email is sent only for critical alerts that were actually emailed in the first place.
Detection runs every six hours in the background. Alert emails are also capped at five per 24 hours per workspace.
Anomaly alerts do not run for agency or partner workspaces, or for demo and internal tenants.
Configuring Anomaly Alerts
Email delivery of anomaly alerts is configurable from the Anomaly Alerts card at Settings > Notifications (/dashboard/settings/notifications). Critical alerts arrive immediately; warnings batch into a morning digest in your store timezone.
Plan availability: The Anomaly Alerts card requires the Pro or Plus tier. On Starter, the card shows an upgrade prompt instead of the controls.
| Control | What it does | Default |
|---|---|---|
| Master toggle | Turns anomaly alert emails on or off entirely. Alerts still appear in the in-app dropdown when off | On |
| Severity floor | Skips emails below the chosen level: Critical only, Critical and warning, or All anomalies | Critical and warning |
| Threshold | An anomaly only emails if the metric is at least this far outside its baseline (5% to 100%, in 5% steps) | 30% |
| Quiet from / Quiet until | No emails during this window, in your store timezone. Critical alerts queue and arrive at the next open window | 21:00 to 07:00 |
| Weekend delivery | When off, only critical alerts are sent on Saturdays and Sundays | Off (critical-only weekends) |
Changes on this card save automatically as you make them - there is no save button.
Tuning the threshold: smaller stores with naturally volatile day-to-day numbers often raise the threshold to 40-50% to cut noise; larger, more stable stores often lower it to 15-20% to catch subtler shifts.
Snoozing From an Email
Every alert email carries a snooze link. Following it suppresses that alert type for 7 days without changing any of your other settings, and confirms with an Open preferences link back to this card.
Acting on an Alert
Each alert links to the page where you can investigate:
- Revenue drop → the main dashboard (
/dashboard) - Ad spend and ROAS alerts → the Ads page (
/dashboard/ads)
Frequently Asked Questions
Can I configure anomaly thresholds?
Yes. The Anomaly Alerts card at Settings > Notifications lets you set the deviation threshold (5-100%, default 30%), a severity floor, quiet hours, and weekend delivery behavior. See Configuring Anomaly Alerts above.
Why am I not getting alerts?
Most likely reasons:
- You're on the Starter tier - anomaly alerts require Pro or Plus. See Pricing Plans.
- You haven't accumulated enough history yet - the engine needs a baseline to compare against.
- Your Anomaly Alerts settings may be filtering them out - check the master toggle, severity floor, threshold, and quiet hours at Settings > Notifications.
- Your workspace has no active subscription, or the deviation has not yet cleared the 30% floor and the $10 / $50 noise floors.
- Anomaly alerts do not run for agency or partner workspaces.
Do alerts replace my SaaS observability tools?
No. Anomaly alerts are about your commerce data, not infrastructure. For platform-side incidents, you'll still see them via the live indicator and integration health UI in the dashboard.
Are alerts sent to all team members?
No. Anomaly emails go to a single resolved recipient per workspace - there is no CC list for anomaly alerts (unlike the Daily Email Summary, which does support additional recipients). The in-app notifications dropdown is workspace-scoped, so anyone who can open the bell sees the same alerts.
Related Guides
- Notifications - the in-app dropdown that surfaces alerts
- Daily Email Summary - email digest including operational alerts
- AI Insights - dashboard insight cards covering similar ground
- Sync Status - investigate failing syncs flagged by alerts
- Pricing Plans - tier requirements for alerts
Last updated: August 23, 2026
Last updated on
In-App Notifications
Find sync events, anomaly alerts, and integration warnings in the MerchantFlow notifications dropdown. Configure email summary and notification preferences from settings.
Ads and Channels Dashboard
Track paid media campaign performance, ad spend by country, and revenue KPIs across Google Ads, Meta Ads, and more in MerchantFlow.