Push notifications from websites, called web push notifications, work through the browser's built-in push notification API. When a visitor arrives on your website, their browser can display a permission prompt asking whether they want to receive notifications from your site. If they accept, their browser registers them with your notification service and you can send messages that appear on their desktop or mobile screen even when they are not on your website. This capability has existed in Chrome, Firefox, Edge, and Android browsers for several years, though Safari on iOS added support more recently.
The subscriber opt-in rate for web push notifications is significantly lower than for email. A visitor who arrived on your site for the first time and is immediately prompted to accept notifications has very little reason to say yes. The opt-in prompt works best when it appears after the visitor has demonstrated genuine interest, such as after they have browsed several pages, completed a positive action, or returned to the site for a second visit. Timing and context dramatically affect how many visitors opt in.
Web push notification tools like OneSignal, PushOwl for e-commerce, and Pusher handle the technical infrastructure of subscriber registration, message delivery, and notification management. OneSignal has a free tier that is sufficient for most small business use cases and integrates with Shopify, WordPress, and most major website platforms. PushOwl is specifically designed for Shopify stores and includes e-commerce-specific features like abandoned cart notifications and back-in-stock alerts.
Push notifications perform best for time-sensitive, high-value messages where the immediacy of the channel is a genuine benefit. Flash sales and limited-time offers, back-in-stock alerts for products customers have expressed interest in, appointment reminders, and shipping status updates all represent cases where arriving on someone's screen in real time is more valuable than landing in an email inbox where the message competes with everything else. General content updates and promotional messages that are not time-sensitive produce lower engagement and higher unsubscribe rates in push than in email.
The opt-out dynamic for push notifications is immediate and final in a different way than email unsubscribes. When someone revokes browser notification permissions, they are gone from your push subscriber list permanently. There is no win-back campaign for push notification subscribers the way there is for email. This means that every notification you send needs to deliver genuine value, because each mediocre notification increases the probability that the subscriber will revoke permission before they receive the notification that would have been worth their while.
Web push notifications are a legitimate channel for businesses with time-sensitive communication needs and an audience that opts in thoughtfully, and a source of notification fatigue and brand damage for businesses that treat them as a high-frequency promotional channel without regard for the recipient's experience.