Hi, @pjmmpls !
Rae from Shopify here. Thank you for reaching out with this question!
At this time, the best way to reply to blog comments is to go directly onto your site from your URL and visit your blog as if you were a customer, or a visitor, like you mentioned. Then, just reply to the comment there by using the field directly below the comment to enter in your information and type your reply.
The option to reply to blog comments without visiting the customer facing side of a website is something that has been requested previously by our merchants, so I’m going to let our teams know that you also inquired about this process. If we do update this, we will share these changes on our Announcements page and also on our changelog, so please make sure to check these pages periodically to stay up to date with any improvements and updates that we release. Hopefully our teams can work towards offering some new methods to handle these replies to make blog management easier for our users in the future.
In the meantime though, if you’re looking for an alternative way to reply to blog comments, I recommend checking out some commenting apps like the ones listed here. An app like Facebook Comments can be used to import blog posts to your site from Facebook, with the added ability to enable and disable comments on these posts. If you’re interested in learning more about how this apps works, it’s a great idea to reach out to the app developer directly so that they can provide more information and assistance.
Let me know if there is anything else I can lend a hand with and I’ll be glad to help out further!