Shopify Chat

Pros: - Free - One click installation - Easy for site visitors to use - Works in combination with @shopify's existing Apple Business Chat sales channel to automatically show Shopify Chat only when Apple Business Chat is unavailable (i.e. Android or Windows devices) Cons: - Messages are not visible from Shopify Admin website, only visible inside the Shopify Ping mobile app (iOS only) - Messages are all anonymous (ex. Shop Visitor 1BC) even if the user was logged in and you can not add notes or details to the customer's profile - In our experience, we found there to be a 10-15 second delay for user chat messages to appear in the Shopify Ping app which we felt was not fast enough. - Limited customization. Shopify's Apple Business Chat sales channel offers the ability to set a greeting message and the placement of the chat button, but Shopify Chat only lets you pick the color of the button from a predefined list (no HTML hex color values) For now, it's a hard pass for us. When Shopify first rolled out Apple Business Chat, I was thrilled but dismayed at the fact that the option showed up for non-Apple visitors and just gave them error messages. This new channel fixes that, but brings in a whole new set of issues. One of my biggest pet peeves is that Apple Business Chat and Shopify Chat are considered two different sales channels when they should only be one. It's just an annoying and unnecessary division. But what really hurts though is the anonymized responses without the ability to link them to an existing customer or add notes. Maybe a future update to Chat will be better, but right now we feel we're better off not having it than offering a feature that should be carrying a beta label.