Kakao Alimtalk Notifications — KakaoTalk Order Messaging App for Shopify
A public Shopify app that delivers order, shipping, delivery and refund notifications to Korean customers over KakaoTalk rather than email or SMS — the channel Korean shoppers actually read. Merchants send from their own Kakao Business profile using customisable Alimtalk templates, manage multiple profiles and templates from one panel, and run targeted campaigns alongside transactional sends. Setup happens entirely inside Shopify with no separate Kakao account or external site. Four tiers, $19–$399/month by message volume, with $0.01 per additional message.
Kakao Alimtalk Notifications — KakaoTalk Order Messaging App for Shopify
A public Shopify app that delivers order, shipping, delivery and refund notifications to Korean customers over KakaoTalk rather than email or SMS — the channel Korean shoppers actually read. Merchants send from their own Kakao Business profile using customisable Alimtalk templates, manage multiple profiles and templates from one panel, and run targeted campaigns alongside transactional sends. Setup happens entirely inside Shopify with no separate Kakao account or external site. Four tiers, $19–$399/month by message volume, with $0.01 per additional message.
The brief
The challenge, and how we approached it
01
The challenge
Korean customers don't read transactional email, and Kakao Alimtalk isn't an API a merchant can just call — it requires a verified Kakao Business profile, templates pre-approved by Kakao, and a registered sender. That onboarding is the barrier, not the messaging. Doing it manually means leaving Shopify for a separate Korean platform.
02
Our approach
Move the whole Alimtalk stack inside the Shopify admin: business profile connection, template creation and approval management, and message sending all handled in-app, so the merchant never opens a separate Korean service. A multi-profile and template manager lets one merchant run several brands or sender identities from one panel. Order events fire notifications automatically via Shopify Flow and Admin integration, with the same template engine reused for targeted marketing campaigns — one system covering both transactional and promotional sends. English and Korean UI serves both local merchants and foreign brands selling into Korea. Message-volume tiering with per-message overage keeps small merchants at $19 while scaling to 30,000 messages.
What we built
Six capabilities shipped for Dana's Bakery
Each one solves a specific part of the brief above.
ZIP-gated shipping
Real-time validation prevents invalid ZIP purchases from entering cart
Drop architecture
Pre-staged inventory with countdown, sold-out gates, and waitlist
Gifting flow
Message cards, recipient addressing, scheduled delivery, gift wrap
Perishable inventory
Daily inventory sync with cold-chain capacity constraints
Drop-day performance
Theme architecture handles 20× traffic spikes without latency
Recurring orders
Holiday subscription flow for repeat gifters
How it ran
10 weeks build, in four stages
Every engagement runs the same four stages, so you always know what happens next and what you owe us at each one.
Stage 1
Audit and scope
We review the current theme, apps and analytics, then write a fixed-scope SOW with named deliverables and a date.
Stage 2
Design and build
Work happens in a dev store on a Git-backed workflow. You get a preview link from week one, not a reveal at the end.
Stage 3
QA and launch
Cross-browser and device QA, redirect map, analytics verification, then a launch window agreed with you rather than dropped on you.
Stage 4
Hypercare
Fourteen to sixty days of included post-launch support while real traffic finds the edge cases.
The outcome
Where Dana's Bakery landed
Conversion is up 2.1× after the PDP rebuild, AOV is up 34% year-over-year thanks to gifting upsells, and drop days are now smooth — zero downtime across 12 drops in the past year.
“
★
★
★
★
★
Every drop day was a stress event before. Now they're just a Tuesday. The team built us infrastructure we can actually grow on.
FounderSeoul Commerce
Tech stack
What this project runs on
The exact platform, services and integrations behind the build.
Commerce platform
Shopify Plus
Launchpad
Shopify Functions
Online Store 2.0
Engineering
Custom ZIP validator
Growth and operations
Klaviyo
ShipBob
More case studies
Other work worth reading
Long-form studies from the same team, with the numbers behind them.
Drop your details and we’ll send back an 8-min Loom with 5 prioritized growth opportunities: no commitment, no sales pitch.
✓
Got it. We’re on it!
Thanks for reaching out. A senior strategist will reply within 24 hours with next steps and (if you opted for an audit) a Loom walkthrough within 48 hours.
