Due to new legislation (10DLC), every USA user is required to request and record consent from any customer before texting them.

This requirement is 100% regardless of use case.

Customer support, Order Updates, Delivery Confirmation, anything MUST have record of consent. The fines for violating this are outrageously large. (talking 5 figures)

It would be incredibly helpful to have consent check boxes similar to email consent that already exists with user account creation, and on the cart pages.

Examples of 10DLC consent text / forms can be found here:
https://www.textline.com/blog/sms-opt-in-message-examples

I expect this will just make it harder for honest businesses to text folks, all while the spammers and scammers just keep sending those texts.

Graham, how are you sending texts to customers - you you have a 3rd party tool for that?

David

Yeah, we have been using a piece of software for about 4 years now:
https://www.ultrasmsscript.com/

We don't yet have it connected to the ECT, however, you can make the software send out sms messages programmatically using the API in the software, so it isn't going to be hard to integrate it with the ECT. Regardless, we can't do that until we are requesting (and recording!) customer consent to receive text messages. The fines for not following the 10DLC rules can be outrageously large (max of $10k!), so I'm not going to tempt it. The addition to the ECT software to request and record customer consent presumably would be incredibly easy seeing as we already do that for email messages. Just one more checkbox and one more database field. Presto! New ECT "feature"!


For the last 4 years we've been using the texting software for a non ECT related business. The software is fantastically capable without having to pay for stupid monthly subscriptions from other providers.

We connect the back end of that software to Twilio as the actual provider. With Twilio you only pay for exactly what you use and the cost per message is extremely low at that.

I'm envisioning creating an integration to text out tracking numbers, delivery confirmations, provide customer support, request reviews, that kind of stuff. I'd create my own opt-in on the cart and account pages, but I don't want to make a database field just to have Vince make an ECT official one in the near future.