Incident details
On March 29, 2026 our Orderly Emails app had an incident which incorrectly deleted collections from a subset of users' stores.
Not all users were affected by this, please check your store as described below.
What happened
A bug in an Orderly Emails update caused some Shopify stores' collections to be incorrectly deleted. The update was intended to clean up duplicate collections created by our app, but due to the bug it affected other collections as well.
As soon as we detected the issue, we stopped the process to prevent further impact to additional users.
How to check if you were affected
You can check your Store Activity Log in the Shopify Admin for any deletions:
https://admin.shopify.com/settings/general/activity
Look for entries that say "Orderly Emails deleted a collection", dated 29th March. If you don't see any such entries, your store was not affected and you can safely ignore this incident.
What we are doing
We have mitigated the bug, and removed the clean-up feature entirely.
We have improved logging and alerting around any api actions which may change store data.
We informed Shopify and worked with them as they investigated whether the deleted collections could be recovered. Unfortunately, Shopify today confirmed that recovery of the deleted collections is not possible.
As the affected collections were never part of our app, our own investigations also confirmed that no deleted collection details are available.
We have worked to identify users that may have been affected by this incident.
Our support team has been and will be available 24/7 to assist where possible.
What you can do
If you use a backup app or have other data exports/archives, we recommend using those to restore any "Custom Collections" (otherwise known as "SmartCollections") that were affected.
We have also published guides to help you recreate deleted collection data using historical website snapshots:
- Getting the list of collections pages from archived data - Extracting additional data from a single collections page
Note: When re-creating a collection in the Shopify Admin, make sure to create it with the same "handle" to restore all previous links, seo etc.
Refer to the Shopify SmartCollections help article for detailed instructions when creating these collections in Shopify.
We are truly sorry
We’ve been building, running and improving Orderly Emails for 10+ years. I know we’ve let down a lot of people, and apologise to those affected.
Bjorn Forsberg
Founder - Orderly Emails
