The timeline on a digital order is a single chronological feed of everything that’s happened to it: every delivery email and every file download, newest first, grouped by day. It’s the fastest way to answer, “did this customer actually get their files?”, without cross-referencing two different screens.
No setup required. Download activity shows on every plan, and so does the fact that a delivery email was sent; the delivery detail — delivered, opened, clicked, bounced — needs a plan that includes email tracking.
When you’d use this
- A customer says they never received their download email, and you want to see whether it was sent, delivered, and opened.
- A customer says a link stopped working, and you want to see how many times they already downloaded it.
- You’re handling a chargeback and need a record of what was delivered and when.
- You want to see the IP address and device behind a burst of downloads before you decide whether a link has been shared.
How it works
Open the order in Fileflare (Orders, then the order number) and scroll to the Timeline card.
Each row is one event, written so a scanned column reads by its first words:
- Downloads read “Customer downloaded filename“.
- Emails all start with the word “Email”. The ones tied to a recipient name them — “Email sent to…”, “Email delivered to…”, “Email opened by…”, “Email bounced when sending to…” — and the rest are just the event: “Email link clicked”, “Email delayed”, “Email dropped”.
Expand a row for the detail
Downloads and failed emails have a caret. Open a download row to see:
- IP address and User agent — useful when you’re deciding whether a burst of downloads is one person on two devices or a link that’s been shared.
- File size — how much was transferred.
Fileflare drops any detail it doesn’t have for a download rather than showing you an empty field, so a row can be shorter than the three above. When it does know which surface the customer downloaded from, you’ll also see an Accessed from line naming it (Email, Download Page, Customer Account, or Thank you page).
Open a bounced or failed email row and you’ll get the reason your mail provider gave.
Filter by kind
The filter icon in the card’s top-right opens a short menu — All activity, Emails, Downloads — with the current choice selected. The icon changes state while a filter is on, so a narrowed feed is never a mystery.
Filter to one file
On any row in the Downloads card, open the ⋯ menu and choose View in timeline. The timeline reloads showing only that file’s downloads, with a note saying which file you’re looking at and a Clear filter button to go back.
This matters on busy orders. The feed shows the 25 most recent entries, so on an order with hundreds of downloads the file you’re investigating can fall off the end of the list. Filtering to the file queries its downloads directly instead of searching what’s already loaded. Note that a file-filtered view shows downloads only — emails aren’t specific to one file, so they drop out.
What the timeline does and doesn’t include
- Email detail needs email tracking. That an email was sent is always visible, and the figures strip at the top of the order counts emails on every plan. Delivery, opens, clicks, and bounces appear on plans that include email tracking. Download events appear on every plan.
- URL assets show no file size. Fileflare doesn’t transfer the bytes for a URL asset — it hands the customer your link — so there’s nothing to measure. A missing size label on those rows is correct, not a bug.
- Location is not recorded. You get the IP address, and you can look it up yourself if you need to.
- Bot fetches look like downloads. Mail scanners and antivirus tools pre-fetch links, and those hits land in the timeline like any other. A download logged seconds after the email went out, from a different IP than the rest, is usually a scanner. (iOS Safari’s automatic previews are the exception — Fileflare already filters those out, and they never count against a limit.)
Common issues
- The card says “No activity yet.” Nothing has been sent or downloaded on this order. If you expected an email, check whether the order is Paid and whether Fileflare’s emails are switched on — see Troubleshoot email delivery.
- A download I know happened isn’t listed. The feed is capped at the 25 most recent entries. Use View in timeline on the file itself to pull its own download history.
- The email rows stop after the send. Delivery, opens, and clicks are plan-gated; the send itself always shows. See Email tracking.
- “Opened” never appears. Some mail clients block open tracking outright, including Apple Mail with privacy protection. Missing opens aren’t evidence the email didn’t arrive.
- A download row has no filename. Download history outlives the file, so if the asset was deleted outright there’s no name left to show. The download itself still happened, and the timestamp and detail are still accurate.