The recent Shopify Inbox update has made chat significantly worse for our small business, and I’m hoping Shopify takes the merchant feedback seriously.

We’re a small, family-owned store, and the owners personally answer customer chats. Live chat is an important part of how we help people before they purchase, so being able to understand who we’re talking to and keep a conversation together matters a lot.

Before this update, a visitor could give us their first name before starting a conversation, optionally leave an email address so we could reply if they left the site, and we could see useful context such as their location, cart, and customer/order information when available.

Since the update, we’ve run into several major problems:

1. Visitors who don’t sign into Shop come through as “Shopify Visitor” with virtually no useful identity or context.

2. We no longer get a first name before chat, which makes multiple conversations much harder to keep organized.

3. We lose useful information such as location and cart contents unless the customer signs into Shop.

4. Customers seem to get dropped from conversations constantly. If they close the chat window or leave the site, they often appear to go offline and then come back in a new conversation/thread.

5. Because those conversations are being separated, a returning customer may think they are continuing the conversation we were already having, while on our end they can look like a completely different anonymous visitor.

6. Even when a visitor does sign in, we have experienced cases where their previous purchases from our store still are not visible to us in Inbox.

7. The result is that we can spend part of a conversation trying to figure out whether this is the same person we were just helping, what they were considering buying, or whether they have already purchased from us.

8. Requiring someone to create or sign into a Shop account just to provide basic identity and shopping context adds unnecessary friction for customers who simply want to ask a question before making a purchase.

This is not just a cosmetic change to the chat widget. It has materially reduced the information available to merchants and made conversation continuity much less reliable.

The previous system worked extremely well for a small business like ours: collect a first name, make email optional, preserve the visitor’s conversation, show us their shopping context, and allow us to help them without forcing them to create an account.

I understand Shopify’s desire to improve verified customer identity and security, but merchants should have the option to choose the previous, lower-friction experience.

Please restore the ability to collect a visitor’s first name with optional email, maintain continuity for returning visitors, and give merchants access to the cart, location, and customer/order context we previously had.

Shopify Inbox used to be one of the most useful tools we had for providing personal customer service. This update has made that considerably harder.