When chat is enabled, the chat bubble icon will appear on the frontend of your store, floating in the bottom right hand corner of the page.

To start a conversation, the customer must click on the chat bubble icon, when they do so, the chat box will appear and there is a message box at the bottom for them to enter their message.

If enabled, customers can also start a conversation using the signpost, which will appear after a few seconds. This makes the message box more easily accessible.

Customers will see their messages with a light blue background. Messages from your operators are shown with a different background, dark blue by default, which can be changed in the chat setup.

If an auto message or chat bot is set up, it will display above the chat bubble when the page loads. Once the page reloads it will continue to be visible to customer inside the chat window.

Note: Auto messages and chat bots are only shown to the customer once. "No operator responded" messages will be shown to the customer once per session.

To set up an auto message, please see our auto messaging guide.

If you have replied to a message from a customer, and they haven't seen it yet, the chat bubble will have a red indicator showing how many unread messages they have.

When returning to the site, if the customer has has a previous conversation, then a small button will appear at the top of the chat box underneath the header.

Clicking this button will load their chat history into the chat box so that they can read their chat history.

There are a few options for how to change the look and behaviour of the chat box, please see our chat setup guide for more information.