Add Chatbots to Shopify Stores

Connect your Shopify store to Chat Data and give your storefront an AI agent that knows your catalog, answers order-status questions, and captures leads straight into your Shopify Customers — without pasting a single line of code into your theme.

Before You Start

• A Shopify store you are staff or owner on, with permission to install apps and edit themes.
• A Chat Data account. You do not need one before you begin — installing from the App Store will prompt you to create one and then resume the install on its own.

You do not need to make your agent public first, and you do not need to allow-list any domains. The Deploy to Shopify storefront step publishes the agent and authorizes your storefront for you.

What the Integration Does

Once your store is connected, your agent can:

• Answer product questions using your real catalog — titles, descriptions, variants, prices, images, inventory, and collections — rather than text scraped off your product pages.
• Track orders for your customers by order number or email, returning status, fulfillment and tracking details, line items, and totals.
• Stay current automatically. Product create, update, and delete events are pushed to your agent's knowledge base as they happen.
• Capture leads into Shopify. Contact details collected by the chat widget are mirrored into your Shopify Customers, tagged so you can find them.
• Deploy to your storefront with one click through a Shopify Theme App Extension, with no theme-code edits.

Choose How to Connect

There are two ways to link a Shopify store. They give you the same commerce features, but they differ in who bills you and in how many agents you can run — so choose before you install, because the outcome is decided by where you start.

Path A — Start in Shopify (Shopify-billed workspace)

You install the Chat Data app from the Shopify App Store. That install marks the workspace it creates as a Shopify workspace.

• Your plan is charged on your Shopify invoice, at the same prices as billing through Chat Data.
• The workspace is capped at one agent on every tier, and that agent is the one connected to the store you are billed for. Extra agents cannot be purchased, and SSO sub-user management is not available.
• The store connection, catalog import, and webhooks are configured for you — the catalog is imported and trained as part of creating your agent.
• Add-ons available: extra message credits, live chat escalation, reseller branding, white-label email, webhook delivery, storage, SMS credits, and usage-based credit auto-recharge.
• Best for a merchant with one storefront who wants everything to live inside Shopify.

Path B — Start in Chat Data (Stripe-billed workspace)

You already have a Chat Data account on a paid plan and connect the store from inside an agent. Your workspace is never marked as a Shopify workspace.

• You keep being billed by Chat Data, and you keep your plan's full agent allowance plus any extra agents you buy — the same number of agents you would have without the store connected.
• You choose which agent the store attaches to, from that agent's Integrations tab. The other agents in the workspace are unaffected and can keep doing whatever else you use Chat Data for.
• The Shopify app and the integration cost nothing extra: they are included with your plan, and nothing is charged to your Shopify invoice.
• Custom domains, SSO, and every other add-on stay available.
• Best for anyone running more than one agent, or already paying Chat Data.

Path A: Install From the Shopify App Store

Step 1: Install the App

Open the Chat Data listing on the Shopify App Store and click Install, then approve the permissions Shopify shows you.

The app requests read access to your products and orders, and read/write access to customers so chat leads can be written back into your Customers list. It never requests write access to products, orders, themes, or storefront content.

Step 2: Sign In to Chat Data

After Shopify authorizes the app you land on Chat Data. Sign in, or create an account — the install resumes on its own once you finish signing up, so you never have to start over.

Chat Data then creates a workspace for your store, sets it as your active workspace, and takes you to your agents. The store's credentials and webhooks are managed for you; there is no access token to copy anywhere.

Step 3: Create Your Agent

Create your agent from the dashboard. Inside a Shopify workspace the setup wizard already knows your store, so three fields are filled in and locked:

• Website is set to your real storefront — your custom domain if you have one, otherwise your myshopify.com domain. This also pre-authorizes the widget to run on your storefront, on the myshopify.com mirror, and inside the Shopify theme-editor preview.
• Products from your Shopify store is added as a training source that cannot be removed.
• Shopify is pre-checked as a deploy channel.

Everything else — name, branding, base prompt, model, instructions — stays fully editable. When you finish the wizard, your catalog is imported and training starts automatically.

Step 4: Deploy the Widget to Your Storefront

Open your agent, go to Embed on site, and click Deploy to Shopify storefront. Your Shopify theme editor opens with the Chat Data app embed already switched on — click Save in the theme editor and the widget is live on your storefront.

That single click also does the setup you would otherwise do by hand: it publishes the agent, and it authorizes your storefront domain, your myshopify.com domain, and the Shopify theme-editor preview to display it. There is no allowlist to fill in and no visibility setting to change first.

Then open your storefront and confirm the chat bubble appears. If it does not:

• Make sure you clicked Save in the theme editor after the embed was switched on.
• Confirm the theme you edited is the published one — deploying again re-opens the editor on whichever theme is currently published.
• If you keep several themes, enable the Chat Data app embed in each theme you intend to publish.

Why There Is No Script to Paste

The widget is a Shopify Theme App Extension app embed block. It belongs to the app rather than to a theme file, so nothing is written into theme.liquid, nothing is lost when you update or switch themes, and there is no snippet to re-paste later. The older method of pasting an embed script into theme.liquid is retired — you should not use it for a store connected to the Chat Data app.

Path B: Connect From the Chat Data Dashboard

Use this path if you want to keep billing on Chat Data, run more than one agent, or attach a store to an agent you already have. Your workspace needs any paid plan; the Shopify integration itself is included at no extra cost.

1. Open your agent and go to the Integrations tab.
2. Click Integrate with Shopify.
3. Enter your store domain — your-store.myshopify.com — and click Connect with Shopify.
4. Approve the permissions in the Shopify window that opens. It closes itself when the connection succeeds.

From here the capabilities are the same as the App Store install: catalog import, order tracking, real-time sync, lead mirroring into your Shopify Customers, and the one-click storefront deploy.

Order Tracking

Order tracking is an AI Action, so the agent calls it only when a customer actually asks about an order.

1. Open your agent's Custom Actions and enable the Order Tracking action.
2. Select Shopify as the platform. Because the store is already connected, there is no domain or token to type in.
3. Save the action.

Add a line to your agent's base prompt telling it to ask for the order number or the email used at checkout before calling the tool. The agent then returns order status, fulfillment and tracking information, line items and quantities, and totals — read-only, and only for the order the customer identifies.

For the full walkthrough and the other supported platforms, see Online Store Order Tracking.

Product Import and Real-Time Sync

Direct product import gives the agent far better answers than crawling your product pages, because each product stays intact as one structured record instead of being split across text chunks, and fields that never render on the page — inventory levels, variant metadata — come through as well.

On an App Store install the catalog is imported and trained as part of creating your agent, so there is nothing to trigger.

Connecting a store from the Integrations tab also starts an import for you, provided the agent has no products yet and no other import is already running. If the agent already has a product catalog — or you want to review and prune products before training — import it yourself from the Sources tab: choose Product, select Shopify, click Import, then Create/Retrain Chatbot. Training an existing catalog is left to you deliberately: it replaces what your agent already knows, so it should be your decision rather than a side effect of connecting.

Product create, update, and delete webhooks are registered against your store the moment it connects, on either path, so later catalog edits reach your agent without another import. See Chatbots Real-time Product Updates for details.

Leads in Your Shopify Customers

When your agent collects a lead, Chat Data mirrors it into your Shopify Customers — creating a new customer record, or looking up and merging into the existing one when the email or phone already exists. The captured form details are appended to the customer's note.

Each mirrored customer is tagged chat-data-lead by default so you can filter for them in the Shopify admin. Change or clear the tag under your agent's Leads settings, in the Shopify Customer Tag field.

Billing

A workspace created by an App Store install is billed through Shopify, on the same invoice as the rest of your apps.

• The same plan tiers at the same prices as billing through Chat Data — see the pricing page for current tiers, prices, and billing intervals.
• Add-ons available on this path: extra message credits, live chat escalation, reseller branding, white-label email, webhook delivery, extra storage, and SMS credits.
• Usage-based auto-recharge for message and scraping credits, with a monthly cap that you approve in Shopify.

Pick a plan from the Chat Data pricing page and Shopify shows you its own approval screen. Declining the charge simply leaves you where you were.

Disconnecting

Uninstall the Chat Data app from your Shopify admin under Settings > Apps and sales channels. This is the only way to remove an App Store connection — the integration panel shows it as managed by Shopify and offers no disconnect button.

On uninstall the store connection is removed, the Shopify subscription ends, and the workspace drops to the Free plan. Your agent, its training data, and its conversation history are kept. Reinstalling reconnects the store and restores your plan if Shopify still reports the subscription as active.

For a store connected with Path B, click Disconnect in the agent's Shopify integration panel instead.

Privacy and Data Handling

• The app uses the Shopify GraphQL Admin API exclusively, with an expiring offline access token that Chat Data rotates for you.
• Order data is read at the moment a customer asks; orders are not bulk-copied into Chat Data.
• Shopify's mandatory privacy webhooks are implemented: a customer data request returns the data held for that customer, a customer redaction erases their leads, and a shop redaction clears all data held for the store.
• If you handle regulated data, see HIPAA Compliance for how a HIPAA workspace changes model, channel, and action availability.

Next Steps

The store connection is the foundation; these are the features merchants add on top of it:

• AI Actions — beyond order tracking, let the agent book appointments, call your own endpoints, or run a workflow.
• Collecting Leads in Chatbots — choose what the widget asks for before it lands in your Shopify Customers.
• Live Chat Escalation — hand a conversation to a human when the agent cannot resolve it.
• Customize the Chatbot Interface — match the widget to your storefront's branding.
• Multi-platform integrations — put the same agent on WhatsApp, Messenger, Instagram, and more.

Troubleshooting

The widget does not appear on my storefront. Confirm the Chat Data app embed is enabled and saved in your theme editor, and that the theme you edited is the published one. Re-running Deploy to Shopify storefront re-opens the editor on the currently published theme.

The agent does not know about a new product. Confirm the product is published to the Online Store sales channel. Real-time sync covers changes made after install; if you connected the store before adding a large batch, run an import from the Sources tab.

Order tracking says it cannot find an order. The customer must give the order number or the email used at checkout. Orders placed on a different store, or draft orders, are not returned.

I installed the app but landed on a sign-in page. That is expected when you are not already signed in to Chat Data. Finish signing in or signing up and the install completes on its own.

I see a "Legacy Shopify Integration Detected" banner. Follow the upgrade steps in Path B above.