PrestaShop email countdown timer that follows your cart rules

Most email countdown timers make you type the deadline twice: once on the cart rule in PrestaShop, once in the timer tool. When the sale is extended by a day, someone has to remember the second one, and until they do your emails count down to the wrong time. A connected timer reads the date from PrestaShop, so there is one source of truth.

PrestaShop keeps three kinds of deadline, and flashtimer reads all of them: a cart rule's validity dates, a product's specific price with an end date, and a catalog price rule. A rule that hasn't started yet counts down to its start, and a cart rule with no uses left counts as over. Shop connection and promotion sync are on Pro and up; the timer itself works on every plan.

With the choices ticked, a new cart rule or a newly discounted product gets its own timer, a changed end date moves the countdown (including in emails already sent, because the GIF is rendered at each open), and a rule that is switched off, deleted or over has its timer archived. Give an ended rule a new date and its timer comes back.

PrestaShop also makes cart rules of its own: a voucher for every credit slip, loyalty reward and cart reminder, each limited to one customer. Those are left out, so your timer list holds campaigns, not hundreds of personal vouchers. If you do want timers for them, tick Include single-customer vouchers.

• Auto-create timers: a new rule or discount becomes a timer.
• Auto-update timers: a changed end date moves the countdown.
• Auto-archive timers: a rule that is off, deleted or over archives its timer.

Out of the box flashtimer reads your shop every few minutes, and nothing has to be installed. For changes within seconds, download the free flashtimer module from the PrestaShop dialog and upload it under Modules → Module Manager → Upload a module: no command line, no developer. It tells flashtimer the moment a rule or a discount is saved or deleted, sends only that rule, and never holds a save up.

On Business, Stock Monitor can also end a timer early when a product, with all its combinations together, runs low.

PrestaShop sends order emails, but your campaigns go out through an email platform. The timer is an image URL, so it works in all of them: paste it into an image block, or paste the HTML snippet into a custom HTML block. For per-recipient features, pick your platform in the embed dialog and flashtimer adds its merge tag where it has one, as for the Mailchimp countdown timer or the Klaviyo countdown timer.

A cart rule countdown is the classic flash sale countdown timer email, and for the biggest weekend of the year see the Black Friday countdown timer email playbook.

When the rule ends, the timer shows your expiry message, or your own fallback image on Basic and up, so a shopper who opens next week is not sent to a code that no longer works.

Connection refused? The message says which of these it is: the address has no PrestaShop webservice, the webservice is switched off, PrestaShop refused the key, the key isn't allowed to read a resource (it names which to tick), or a firewall is blocking /api/.