Fomo shows website visitors what other customers are doing: a recent order, a new sign-up, a fresh review, displayed as a small notification on the page. By its own count, it runs on more than 10,000 websites and sends 500 million notifications a month.
It began as Notify, a Shopify app first listed in 2013, and its Shopify listing rates 4.5 from more than 150 reviews. Fomo is now part of the Relay Commerce group, and the product lives at usefomo.com.
What it shows
Notifications are built from templates, with filters that can shorten a customer’s name to an initial for privacy. Geo targeting and page rules decide where each one appears, roundups summarize activity like “12 people bought this today”, and messages can appear in more than 27 languages.
Fomo’s integrations
Fomo lists more than 100 integrations, including Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, Magento, Wix and Squarespace for orders, Stripe and Recharge for payments and subscriptions, and Trustpilot, Reviews.io, Yotpo, Judge.me and Google Reviews for reviews. Mailchimp and Zapier connect it to most other tools.
The Fomo API
On paid plans, Fomo’s REST API creates events from any system, each tied to a notification template. Events can be found, updated or deleted later, and an external ID stops the same event being shown twice. Official libraries cover PHP, Node, Python and Ruby.
Fomo says it doesn’t use cross-site tracking cookies and is GDPR compliant, with data transfers covered by the EU-US Data Privacy Framework and its UK extension.
Feeding Fomo from systems without an app
For systems that can send a webhook, Fomo provides a unique webhook URL. Incoming data is mapped to Fomo’s template fields, and an account can have as many webhooks as it needs.
That’s the route for a booking tool or custom checkout with no Fomo app. Fomo shows the last payload it received, so each incoming field can be paired with a template variable. Standard fields need Fomo’s exact names, like first_name or city, and any other field can take a custom name for use in a template. The order or booking reference goes in external_id, the same duplicate guard the API uses. A webhook also skips the polling delay of some standard integrations, because the event arrives as it happens.
Keeping test orders and stale events out
Any event that reaches Fomo can become a notification, test orders included. Template Actions remove events whose details match a rule, such as a first name containing “Bot”, and the Events page lists each removed event with the reason. Age is the other filter. The limit settings hide events older than a set threshold, so a 10-hour threshold on a site whose latest order is a day old leaves nothing to show.
Real events, from the real systems
With webhook URLs and an API, Fomo can be fed by almost any system. A booking tool can announce new appointments, a custom checkout its orders, and a review platform its latest five-star review, each one arriving as it happens with an external ID that keeps it from showing twice.
Social proof tools are one of the apps that add up quietly, so a look at the whole stack is worth doing first. If events are being copied across manually today, it’s worth pricing that time before choosing a fix.