3 min read

Chatwoot (support inbox)

The Chatwoot app puts a chat bubble on every page of your store and sends the messages to Chatwoot , a free, open-source support inbox where your team answers website chat, WhatsApp, email and more in one place.

Live chat on your store, in our themes and in a theme you imported from Shopify.
Shoppers recognised: a signed-in shopper’s chat arrives with their name, email, phone, the date they became a customer, how many orders they placed, how much they spent and their last order.
Contacts kept in sync: when a customer signs up, changes their details or pays, their Chatwoot contact is created or updated.
Conversations card on each customer page and order page, with links straight into Chatwoot.

Chatwoot runs on its own: use Chatwoot Cloud or your own Chatwoot server. The app only connects to it.

What you need

A Chatwoot account (Cloud or self-hosted) and a Website inbox in it. To add one: in Chatwoot, Settings → Inboxes → Add inbox → Website, type your store’s address and finish the steps.
For contacts and the Conversations card: an API access token. In Chatwoot, click your avatar → Profile settings and copy the Access token at the bottom.
For recognising shoppers: the inbox’s identity secret. In Chatwoot, open the website inbox → Configuration → Identity validation, copy the HMAC token and turn on Enforce user identity validation.

Connect it

Go to Apps, find Chatwoot under Connections and click Install.
Open Apps → Chatwoot.
Chatwoot address: where your Chatwoot opens, for example app.chatwoot.com or https://support.yourstore.in. Tip: paste a full dashboard link and the account id fills itself in.
Account id: the number after /app/accounts/ in your Chatwoot address bar.
Website inbox token: in the website inbox’s Configuration, copy the websiteToken value from the script shown there.
Paste the API access token and the identity secret. Both are stored encrypted and are never shown again; paste a new one any time to replace it.
Click Test connection. It checks the token can open the account and the website token belongs to it. It creates nothing in Chatwoot.
Click Save.

The chat shows on your store straight away. Open your store in a private window to see it.

Shoppers

Recognise signed-in shoppers (on by default): a shopper who is signed in to your store chats as themselves, so you never ask “what’s your order number?”. The identity secret proves it is really them, so nobody can chat as somebody else.
Keep customers as Chatwoot contacts (on by default): every new customer, every change to a customer’s details, and every payment updates their Chatwoot contact. A shopper who chatted as a guest with the same email is joined to their customer record instead of being added twice.

Next to each chat, Chatwoot shows these contact attributes: customer_since, orders_count, total_spent (in rupees), last_order and last_order_at. To show them neatly, add them in Chatwoot under Settings → Custom attributes (applies to: Contact).

Chatwoot keeps a cookie so a shopper’s chat carries on from page to page. Under Privacy → Load the chat pick when the chat loads:

Always (default): a chat is something the shopper asks for, so it loads for everyone.
After the shopper allows analytics cookies, or marketing cookies: the chat waits for that answer on your cookie banner.

The chat never loads on the sign-in pages, and never in the theme editor’s preview.

Conversations on customer and order pages

With an API access token saved, each customer page and order page has a Conversations card: the shopper’s latest chats with their status (Open, Pending, Snoozed, Resolved), the last message and how long ago it was. Click one to open it in Chatwoot. An order placed by a guest shows the conversations of the email on the order.

Good to know

Customers imported in bulk (from Shopify) become Chatwoot contacts the next time they sign in, change their details or pay.
If Chatwoot is busy or down, the sync tries again by itself a few times; a problem that does not clear shows on Apps → Installed apps.
Uninstalling the app keeps your settings, so installing it again picks up where you left off.

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