DO NOT USE THE NEW SHOPIFY INBOX WITH AI IF YOU CAN AVOID IT!
The new system does not ask the customer for contact information anymore. We found this out the hard way, as a customer wrote to follow-up on something she saw in our store and we have no way to reach her! When the customer doesn’t get a reply, this may result in us losing a $500 sale.
I can’t believe the stupidity of whoever programmed this new system. And support isn’t an help at all. They told me I should respond and ask the customer for her email.
You can’t respond if the customer isn’t online. And I can’t write to her to ask her her email WITHOUT HER EMAIL.
The ineptitude here is staggering.
The solution — though it’s too late to salvage this sale for us — is to require people to sign in to an acvount before they can ask a question. That is NOT a solution. Potential customers are not going to want to create an account just to ask a question.
The support rep said to turn off the AI. It’s already off. All that does is prevent the AI from replying. It does not return the old form.
Their final response to me before I came here to write this was to wait for the customer to try to contact is again. If you wrote to a store to tell them that you wanted to buy something, and they dodn’t respond to you at all, would you bother trying again?
I’m sorry this happened, especially with a potential $500 sale involved.
I really hope Shopify sees feedback like this and adds an option for Shopify Inbox AI to collect a customer’s email before they start a chat.
For now, you could try adding instructions for Shopify Inbox AI to ask customers for their email address in the chat, or use another chat app that requires contact details before a message is submitted. I know this won’t help recover the lost sale, but it may help prevent the same issue from happening again.
Thanks @Ellie-BOGOS and @Steve_TopNewYork for the commisseration. I appreciate that others can see why this upset us.
The short term fix is to add this to the autoresponder: BY DEFAULT, CHATS HERE ARE ANONYMOUS. WE CANNOT REPLY TO YOU UNLESS YOU PROVIDE AN EMAIL ADDRESS.
A simple workaround, but one we had no idea we’d need until it was too late. Hopefully others will see this thread and it will prevent them from having the same issue. But this really needs to be addressed.
I’m glad you’ve found a practical short term workaround, and adding that notice to the autoresponder is a smart way to set expectations for visitors.
That said, I agree this shouldn’t be something merchants have to discover after losing a potential sale. An optional prompt to collect an email address before a visitor leaves the conversation, or a configurable setting to require contact details before starting a chat, would provide a much better experience for both merchants and customers.
Hopefully the Shopify team considers this feedback, as it seems like a reasonable enhancement that could help prevent missed sales opportunities in the future. If enough merchants raise the same concern, it may help prioritize the feature request.
And it should be with yourself.
Your using a free entry level thing made for a bare minimum marketing bullet point in a long list of 'we have X" with no guarantees or SLA etc etc
Then interacting with tier0 support or a chatbot for support.
Even IF complaining here somehow got a thousand merchants chiming in ‘me too!’ and made shopify “fix” what ever is going on why would you ever trust them to not do it again.
You set yourself up for this outcome, shopify is a tool don’t make it your ENTIRE business.
Otherwise your company is a toy in someone elses sandbox.
Invest in real tools every single chance you can they make you money and avoid these time wasting outcomes by being cheap.
Now’s the point where you really need to choose what your goal is here: being frustrated and doubling down, or not even replying as you move on to actually fixing your business processes regardless of what some other business does.
Oh, Paul. I can only assume you are shilling for another app that we should buy so we can all pay even more than we already pay Shopify.
What I describe was, until a week or two go, a standard feature of the Shopify Inbox. The app always took the customer’s name and email. It is completely normal that users wouldn’t notice that change, as we did not.
My goal, beyond admittedly complaining, was to make sure nobody else has the same experience.
We ran into the exact same issue and reached out to Shopify customer support to ask if we could revert to the old version. Here is their official explanation for the change:
"I completely understand where you’re coming from. This is actually one of the bigger changes in the updated Shopify Inbox experience, so let me walk you through what’s happening and why.
*The old name and email form that customers used to fill in before chatting has been replaced with a verified sign-in step. Here’s the reasoning behind it: the old form only checked that an email address was formatted correctly, but it didn’t confirm the customer actually owned that email. That created a privacy concern where someone could enter another person’s email and potentially access their order history."
*
I believed a simple, optional field where customers can voluntarily enter their contact details if they’d like a follow up, along with a clear disclaimer that without it, we can’t get back in touch once they leave could help at this stage.
That’s a rough way to find out, and you’re right that it changed without anyone noticing.
Worth checking one thing though. The setting is “Require sign-in to chat with staff”, and it’s on by default for new installs but not for stores that already had Inbox. If yours is off, that’s why the chats are anonymous.
And the part that might change your mind on turning it on: if you’re on Shopify’s newer customer accounts, signing in isn’t creating an account in the old sense. It’s a six-digit code emailed to them, no password, no form. Check Settings, Customer accounts, to see which version you’re on, because if you’re still on the classic password-based ones then your objection is right and I’d leave it off too. With sign-in on, your reply gets emailed to them after they leave, which is the recovery path you needed.
On your workaround, move it into the greeting that shows before they type rather than the reply after, and frame it as a benefit. “Leave your email and we’ll reply even if we’re offline” gets answered far more often than the all-caps version, which reads as a terms notice and gets skipped.
The deeper issue is that a $500 question shouldn’t depend on you being at a keyboard, and that’s what I built Carti for, so I suppose I am biased (but I do use it on my own 7-figure store).
It’s an AI shopping assistant rather than a support inbox, which is a real difference here. It reads your catalog and your policy pages and answers the question instantly on the page, so most of what would have arrived as an anonymous chat gets resolved without ever needing a reply from you. When something genuinely needs a human, it takes contact details before handing it over, which is the exact gap that just cost you. It also recommends and cross-sells while it’s answering, so the conversation tends to end in a cart rather than a ticket. It’s totally free at most store sizes, and you can install it in five minutes without any theme editing.
That sounds like a frustrating experience, especially when you know it may have cost you a high-value sale.
If the new Inblox experience no longer collects contact information before a conversion starts, I can see why that would be a concern for merchants who don’t respond immediately or aren’t online during business hours. Without a way to follow up, it’s difficult to continue the conversation once the visitor has left.
I do think there should be an option for merchants to choose how chats are initiated. For example, requiring an email before starting a conversation, requesting it before the visitor leaves, or allowing anonymous chats. Different businesses have different needs, and a one-size-fits-all approach won’t work for everyone.
In the meantime, it may be worth submitting this through Shopify’s official feedback channels as s feature request. If enough merchants highlight the impact on missed sales and customer commmunications, it has a better chance of being considered for future updates.
I’m curious whether other merchants using the new Shopify inbox have run into the same issue. Has anyone found a workflow that still lets you follow up with customers who leave the chat before providing their contact information?
I’ll take a look at Carti. Inbox has been a simple, well-integrated (obviously) solution for our not-7-figure store, but this is a major complication. We got another inquiry for a custom order today. Despite my message saying you must leave an email address for a response, they didn’t leave one.
Yep, I saw that, too, and already have it turned on. I have no problem with the AI being anonymous. In fact, I was against their suggestion that you require customers to sign in before they can use the chat because I know I, as a customer, would not give away my email address if I just want a quick answer. The new setup makes me happy.
