The Best Free Live Chat App for Shopify: Tawk.to Review and Tutorial

The Best Free Live Chat App for Shopify: Tawk.to Review and Tutorial

  • Once the Tawk.to Live Chat Shopify App is installed, the next step is to create a tawk.to account, filling in your name, email and password, then clicking on signup for free. Once this is completed, the start guide should open. 

  • The first step is language selection. The Tawk.to Live Chat Shopify App has 20 languages available for you to choose from, after which you can move on to property details. Here you should enter the store name and site URL. The next one is team members, where you should add more agents to the service.

  • The final step on the onboarding is placing the code. It happens in very much the same way as with other live chat apps. You can choose to place their code manually on each page of your shop, or you can choose to do it automatically by selecting Shopify from this dropdown list. 

A new window should appear for adding your live chat widget. Choose your store from the dropdown list, and a new field should appear. Here you should choose the widget type, click on use selected widget and now proceed to the dashboard. 

  • On the app dashboard, first, you will get 9 introductory app tips which are very useful. There are nicely organized analytics on the first page, just the basic ones you would check a few times a day. And on the left, there’s a sidebar with the list of items. You can browse through:

    • Dashboard

    • Monitoring

    • Active chats

    • Messaging

    • Reporting

    • Add-ons

    • Admin

In the bottom left corner, you can find a knowledge base with plenty of useful articles. 

  • To customize your live chat widget first, click on Admin, which should take you to the settings page from the sidebar menu. The first item on the list is Property settings. Since you already pasted the widget code to your page in the start guide, you can proceed to widget settings. The first step is to change the widget name. In case you want to turn off your widget, all you need to do is toggle the button from on to off. The next step is to choose how you want your widget to behave on your site; two options are available for the Shopify store, Maximize or popout window.

  • For the notification settings, you can choose to include or exclude a number of options.

  • Hide estimated wait time

  • Disable sound notification

  • Disable message preview

  • Disable agent typing notification

  • Disable visitor typing notification

  • Disable browser tab notification

Also, in this tab, you can play with visibility and feature settings. Click on Save, and you can proceed to our next step. 


There is no need to go back to the previous page; just choose what you want to edit from the dropdown list. The next step is widget appearance. 

  • To use the desktop widget, you can choose from two different styles; go with this simple icon. In this first section, you can also choose the position and size of your desktop widget. Also, there is a gallery button, click on the gallery, and you can pick from its icons, or you can even upload your own icon. Click on upload, choose your own design. In this tab, you can also play with the colors of each element of your chat widget. Click on Save, and you can jump to the widget content tab. 

  • In this tab, you can customize how your chat widget will look like when you are online, away and offline. Using the pre-chat form, you can collect a significant amount of emails; elements you can include in your pre-chat form are:

  • name

  • email

  • department

  • a phone number

  • question with input text

  • question with text area

  • multiple choice

  • options choice

Choose the needed elements and preview, then click on save. In the dropdown menu, you can customize the consent form, availability restriction, and scheduler. 


Going back to App Admin, you can try out elements such as:

  •  Property Members

  •  Shortcuts

  •  Triggers

  •  Webhooks

  •  Ban list

  •  Departments

  •  Mail Notifications

  •  Add-ons

  •  Billing

  •  Tabs

  •  Agent Alerts

  •  Knowledge Base

  •  Data & Privacy


 

In the add-on tab, you can remove tawk.to branding, hire live chat agents for 1$ per hour, and buy a video-voice-screen sharing function for this app which will cost you $29 a month. 


Reload your store and test out your new changes, 


The first thing about chats that you immediately notice is that they are treated a lot like calls. The notification sound for a new chat is literally the sound of a ringing phone. And it will keep on ringing until someone picks up the ‘call.’ Agents can either choose to message the customer directly or send a whisper that will be visible to other agents only, which allows for several agents to participate in the same chat and coordinate in a way that is not visible for the customer.

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