Chat appearance and preferences
Match the chat to your store's colours and logo, place its button, choose how your team is named, and decide what visitors fill in before chatting.
On this page
Open Settings > Chat, choose the chat, and use the Appearance and Preferences tabs. Only admins can change them. A preview of the real chat window sits beside both tabs and follows your changes before you save; switch it between In hours, Offline and Conversation to check each state. Click Save changes to publish, or Discard to go back. Stores pick up the change within about a minute.
Appearance#
Brand#
| Setting | What it changes |
|---|---|
| Brand colour | The window's header, the launcher button, buttons, and the visitor's own messages. Pick one of the seven swatches or type any hex code. When the colour is light, the text on it turns dark so it stays readable. |
| Logo | Shown in the window's header in place of your helpdesk's name. PNG, JPEG, GIF or WebP, up to 2 MB. It is drawn 28 pixels high on your brand colour, so a light or transparent logo works best. Remove goes back to the name. |
The greeting and the other lines visitors read are set per language on the Languages tab; see Chat languages and privacy notice.
Launcher#
The launcher is the round button that opens the chat.
Launcher: keep Icon only, or choose Icon and label to put a short text such as "Chat with us" beside the icon. The label is written per language on the Languages tab.
Corner: Bottom right or Bottom left.
From the side and From the bottom: how far the button sits from the edges, 0 to 200 pixels. Move it up when it covers a cookie banner or your store's own floating button.
When a reply arrives while the window is closed, the launcher shows a count of new replies.
How your team appears#
Choose how agents are named to visitors on their messages:
First name, such as "Sam"
Full name, such as "Sam Rivera"
Your helpdesk's name, so every reply comes from the team rather than a person
Size of the window#
The window has a fixed size on computers and cannot be resized from the settings. On screens up to 480 pixels wide it opens full screen. The launcher is drawn in its own isolated layer, so your theme's styles do not change it and its styles do not leak into your pages.
Preferences#
When the chat is live#
When an agent is available, During business hours, or Never: messages only. This and the offline form are covered in Chat outside business hours. The top of the tab says whether the chat is live right now, how many agents are online, and whether you are inside business hours.
Where the chat shows#
| Switch | When off |
|---|---|
| Show the chat | The launcher disappears from every site until you switch it back on. |
| Show outside business hours | The launcher is hidden while you are closed. A visitor with a conversation going still sees it. |
| Show on phones | The launcher is hidden on screens narrower than 640 pixels. |
To keep the chat off certain pages, leave the script out of those pages; see Put chat on your store.
What visitors give before chatting#
The start form always asks for a message. You choose the rest:
Email address: Optional or Required. Visitors who give one get your reply by email if they leave before you answer. Required means every conversation can be answered, but fewer visitors start one.
Name: Not asked, Optional or Required.
The customer on the ticket is matched or created by the email address. A visitor who gives none appears as a customer without an address, and can be answered only in the chat window.
The offline form always asks for an email address, since the answer goes there.
Replies by email#
Send from chooses the mailbox for answers to offline messages and for replies to visitors who left before you answered. The visitor's own answer by email comes back to the same ticket. A visitor counts as gone after about three minutes without the chat open on any page of your site.
How light the chat is#
A store page loads one small script for the chat, about 3 KB compressed, which browsers and our servers cache for a minute. It draws the button and nothing else: the chat window and its own script (about 13 KB compressed, cached for a long time) load only when the visitor opens the chat, or at once when they already have a conversation going. A page view with the chat closed makes no further requests.
Related articles
- Put chat on your storeCreate a chat, paste its one-line script into your store's theme, limit it to your own sites, and test it before customers see it.
- Chat outside business hoursWhen the chat is live, who counts as available, what visitors see when nobody is, and how their offline messages reach you and get answered by email.
- Chat languages and privacy noticeOffer the chat in English, French, German and Spanish, write its texts in each, and what to do about a privacy notice, which the chat does not show.
- Chat questions and limitsWhy the chat button can vanish, how long visitors keep their conversation, attachments, videos, page speed, and what you cannot control with your own code.
Still stuck?
Write to the Growth Dept team and a person answers. Say which helpdesk you work in and what you were trying to do.