Getting started with Shopify

Connect your Shopify store so HelpStack's AI and agents can answer order, tracking, and product questions — and optionally show a live chat widget on your storefront.

What you get#

No technical knowledge required. The steps below take roughly 10–15 minutes and need nothing beyond clicking through a few settings pages.

Just signed up? If you said you sell on Shopify during onboarding, the install step connects your store for you and ends with a one-click switch in your theme editor, so you can skip Steps 1 and 3 below.

Billing. A connected Shopify store pays for HelpStack through Shopify, on the app's pricing page in your Shopify admin, so you are never billed twice. Stores that have not connected yet are asked to connect before choosing a plan.

Step 1 — Connect your store#

1. In your HelpStack dashboard, go to Settings → Integrations.
2. Find the Shopify tile and click Connect Shopify.
3. Type your store's .myshopify.com domain — for example your-store.myshopify.com — and click Connect.
4. You will be taken to Shopify. Click Install (or Approve) to grant HelpStack read-only access to your orders, customers, and products.
5. You'll land back in HelpStack with a green "Connected" status.

That's it — from this point on, agents see an Orders sidebar panel on every conversation, and the AI can answer order and product questions.

Step 2 — Allow order & customer data (one-time)#

Shopify requires a separate approval before any app can read order and customer details. Until this is done, order questions will reply "access restricted"; product questions work without it.

1. Open the Shopify Partner dashboard at dev.shopify.com and sign in.
2. Click Apps in the left sidebar and select the HelpStack app.
3. Go to API access (or App setup → API access).
4. Find Protected customer data access and click to open it.
5. Enable the Order object and tick Name, Email, and Phone.
6. For the reason, write: customer service — agents look up order status for shoppers.
7. Click Save and wait for Shopify's approval (usually instant for new apps in development).

You only do this once. The permission is app-level and stays in place across updates.

Email is not optional here. HelpStack compares the email on the order against the one the shopper gives before it reads anything back (see "How order lookups protect your customers" below). Without the Email field ticked in step 5, the AI cannot confirm an order belongs to the person asking, so it will report that it found no matching order.

How order lookups protect your customers#

Anyone can open the chat bubble on your storefront, and order numbers usually run in sequence — 1001, 1002, 1003 — so an order number on its own is not proof of anything. HelpStack therefore treats it as half an answer:

• To look up a specific order, the AI needs the order number and the email address the order was placed with. If the shopper has given only a number, the assistant asks for the email before it looks anything up.
• If the two don't match, the shopper is told no matching order was found. They are not told that the order exists but the email is wrong, because that alone would confirm somebody else's order is real.
• Customer history (order count, total spent) is only ever shown for the person in that conversation. The AI cannot be talked into pulling up somebody else's.
• "Find my orders by email" still works exactly as before: a shopper who gives their address gets their own orders back.

Your own team is unaffected. The Orders sidebar panel is for signed-in agents looking at your own store, so it keeps showing everything it always did.

Step 3 — Show the chat widget on your storefront (optional)#

This step puts a chat bubble on your Shopify store so shoppers can ask questions without leaving. Skip it if you only want the AI to answer questions that come in through other channels (email, Instagram, etc.).

3a — Enable the widget in HelpStack

1. Go to Settings → Integrations and open the Storefront widget section.
2. Toggle Enable storefront widget ON.
3. Under Default channel, pick the Website Chat channel you want to use. (Create one first under Settings → Channels if you haven't already.)
4. Optionally add per-language rows — shoppers whose browser is set to that language will be routed to a different channel. Unmapped languages fall back to the default.
5. Click Save.

3b — Add the widget to your theme

Choose one of the two methods below:

Option A — App embed (recommended, no code)

The App embed method lets you toggle the widget on and off from the Shopify theme editor with a single click. No code changes needed. This works with all Online Store 2.0 themes.

1. In your Shopify admin, go to Online Store → Themes.

2. Next to your live theme, click the pencil (Edit) icon or Customize.

   

3. In the theme editor that opens, look for the App embeds section in the left sidebar — it has a puzzle-piece icon, near the bottom.

4. Find HelpStack Chat in the list and toggle it ON.

   

5. Click Save in the top-right corner of the theme editor.

The chat bubble appears on your storefront immediately.

Option B — Manual snippet

Use this if your theme doesn't support App embeds (older Debut or Brooklyn themes).

1. In HelpStack, go to Settings → Integrations and copy the snippet shown in the Storefront widget section. It looks like:

   <script src="https://helpstack.eu/api/shopify/storefront-widget.js?shop=your-store.myshopify.com" async></script>
   

2. In your Shopify admin, go to Online Store → Themes → Edit code.

3. Open theme.liquid (under the Layout folder).

4. Paste the snippet just before the closing </body> tag.

5. Click Save.

Troubleshooting#

Related#

• Widget embed
• Custom agent tools
• Getting started with WooCommerce
• Channels guide