Shopify Inbox Reviews

by Applover1236836

Ping is a great concept for small business owners to be able to provide live customer service via chat, but ShopifyInbox itself is clunky.

When you’re having a chat with a customer, in Ping it gets broken out to different chat records (8+), so you don’t have the whole chat thread in one chat record. How was it built this poorly to function like this?

Search is completely useless. So if you’ve chatted with a customer a few weeks ago, and you want to find that chat to look at the history, it’s impossible. All searches always come up empty.

The welcome and away messages are nice, but they appear EVERY TIME a customer sends a message in a thread. So on the rare occasion that the chat is contained in a single thread, the welcome and away messages should only show once, after the first customer message.

No desktop or web app? Luckily I use a keyboard with my iPad, otherwise I would have deleted it s a long time ago. Of course it’s nice to be able to respond to customers on your phone, if you’re away from your home office, but it shouldn’t be the only way to use if.

Shopify is a phenomenal platform with excellent customer service. ShopifyInbox feels like it was thrown together as an afterthought.

by Cap'n Shame

If you really want to turn your business into a waking nightmare- integrate ShopifyInbox into your store. You’ll find that the only people who try to contact you via this are total sociopaths or just pranksters. You may even get the occasional stalker. It is completely and absolutely unnecessary unless you’ve designed a site so bad that it needs instant feedback from a debugger who can message you instantly which, again, pointless. Post your email address visibly on your page so that people can reach you that way. Otherwise you are only adding something that will irritate you and not lead to any kind of sale 9/10 times. Not worth it at all.

by Wavesdept

Ping is a game changer for being able to help our customers immediately and effectively! It’s wonderful to have a tool that makes that communication possible.

There are two annoying things: 1) there is a constant “new/unread” message prompting you to begin advertising with Kit. Imagine an ad that never leaves your inbox—especially if you don’t require the services it’s offering. Annoying.

2) The other has probably been laid out a thousand times, but there’s no desktop application for Ping. So you can look forward to running all your online chats from your phone. Not really the way we like to spend our days! Nor is it very scalable — even with setting up shortcuts.

by Jlawsoul

The customer chat feature leaves much to be desired. There is a lag between when a customer sends a message and when you receive it. Often times, the customer seems to have closed out of the chat even when I reply instantly. It would be great to know whether the customer read and received the message or if I am just typing into an abyss.
The Kit marketing feature is kind of lame. It doesn’t result in any sales for me and it is always suggesting to market products that “are popular this week” when they’re not actually popular products. It’s all counterproductive and I’ve spent a couple hundred dollars on advertising and have only lost money.

by Lsandell

ShopifyInbox has the potential to convert shoppers into customers BUT what good is it if it sending my response as an email? It’s not real time chat. I’m also not getting notifications on my phone and I’m not in my laptop all day, that’s the point. My customers message winding up in the crappy messenger app is a downfall. I would rather have the ability of a chat to go to an actual phone number as a text message or creat an app that gives you a real-time notification that you can respond to from you app, not send an email

by BrianDedmi94

It’s really convenient and helpful to have a messenger chat to talk with customers, but it needs some work! First off sometimes it won’t load the messages, I will get a notification and when I Open Ping that message thread doesn’t show up, and never loads later either. Second, would be VERY helpful if it was possible to edit/select multiple message threads at once to delete/hide them, swiping right and clicking “done” is very very slow and annoying to do. Third and worst flaw, you can’t see who is messaging you, it just says “shop visitor 001”, that’s understandable if it’s a new customer that’s never been on the site and never made a purchase/input customer info, but they really need to make it automatically identify customers who have an account or have placed an order before, so many people message about their order and You can’t see who it is unless they say their email/phone#/name themselves, it would be very helpful to be able to respond to answer a customers question right away instead of having to ask questions to identify them and their orders.. other than these few flaws the messenger is great and very helpful!

by Siraj0110

I’ve had my saved replies removed/deleted twice now.... why?

I would like the customer to fill out who they are and possibly see if they've ordered before, if they have abondoned cart, etc so you know who you are talking to. Right now it's just a generic ID being assigned to each person and I find that most conversations because of this are very unnecessary. When I fill in my info on a chat box it's because I need something or help. I find because it's so easy to enter anything, useless time is spent responding to people who don't respond back.

by Someknight

I like that ShopifyInbox is free and has some built in features like automated FAQs and integrations with Apple / FB / Shopify Chat.

I don’t like that you’re only able to set an away message for your unavailable times and that ShopifyInbox doesn’t respect those times you set and notifies you “a customer needs a response or they may leave your store” when I’m trying to set some boundaries for work / life balance on my weekends.

Ideally I wish there was a way that you could set those availability times to disable the chat option on your site. I understand the thought process that it’s a potentially lost lead, but having a chat feature display when the chat isn’t actually available is a worse customer experience. I sometimes go through the hassle of enabling and disabling the chat manually, but more often just finding myself leaving it disabled.

by ShxuenzusbajIsowbx

I love the integrated features with Shopify like being able to seamlessly share product links, invoices and discount links...but the limitations with capturing the customer's information before starting the chat is annoying and actually counterproductive. If i dont know who i am speaking to or how to reach them if I missed their chat request then I have no way of following up with that potential customer. Very bad, and because of that reason alone I'm switching to the "Pure Chat" app until Shopify fixes these annoying limitations.

by Joseph Condon

It’s drives me nuts that I can’t set my availability hours. I’m getting chat requests when I’m in bed at 1 am because my store shows I’m online and available to chat. I reach out to customer service and they confirmed there is no way to set hours. What? On top of that, I don’t always get a notification when someone chats. I opened ShopifyInbox today to see a message that was 4 hours old. It would be nice to set hours and let people submit their question for a later reply. Also, it would be nice to have a text sent to me when I have a chat request, and even that I could just reply to that request via text (using a masked number). This is all standard functionality that was included in most apps when I was using woocommerce. I will upgrade my review when some changes are made.

by Skyclad The Love Fool

Customers use this quite a bit, so that’s both a plus and a challenge. However, notifications seem sporadic, so I often miss messages. Supposedly you can set a message to auto-respond to customers , but when I try to do that on iPhone, I get an error saying I must pick a time zone from the picker below. There is NO place in ShopifyInbox to do that, and clicking okay to close the error results on losing the entire message I had set up. It ought to pull a time zone right from our site….. And, since you can’t actually choose away hours (big issue) it really doesn’t need a time zone anyway.

by California2244821

I absolutely appreciate ShopifyInbox being free. But!!!! the whole point when it was Ping was for a customer to be able to reach you in real-time if they had a question by clicking the ‘Chat With Us Button’. The speed of being able to reply to a customer while they were in the store was invaluable and converted to sales.

This new Shopify Inbox….absolutely no notification. I’ve had to add a Quick Reply message to compensate that says we are helping other customers and we will answer their question as soon as we can because we are not being notified. The Ping was amazing because even if I was sleep that distinctive sound would alert me a customer had a question and I could respond before they left the store with items still in their cart.

Lastly when I tested the Inbox the delay from me acting as a customer and sending a question was an intensive amount of time.

I know change and bugs need to be worked out. But I would literally PAY to have PING. The inbox leaves a lot to be desired. The premise was that this was to make it easier to manage customer conversations but if we are not receiving notification that a customer needs assistance in real time this is actually doing more harm.

by Christiana1993

It’s pretty great. I love the automated messages that are available, etc. since it’s only me responding. The only thing I’m having trouble with is that I noticed that if the same person reaches out twice, the second time they aren’t sent my hours and I just had an issue with that today. The first time they reached out was a month ago and this time they reached out at 4am and and obviously I was asleep, but the message about my hours didn’t send to them and they yelled at me.

by T101xxx

As the founder of the company and only Admin of the company Shopify store, Ping should allow the user of the company iPhone to chat with customers on it. Instead, it gives the message “You need permission to chat with customers” when a customer asks a question through Ping. There is no clear path for the Administrator to use to correct this. Not happy. This was not a problem prior to the recent Shopify Ping update. Fix this.

by George Dreemer

I love ShopifyInbox , it works great. Sometimes there is a slight delay with receiving messages from the customer, but it’s nothing drastic.

The only thing I hope to see is the ability to receive images from customers. One of the things we use the chat feature is for receiving discount codes. Customers need to be able to send in a screenshot as proof of giveaway completion. Unfortunately, we don’t receive images.

We hope this feature is added in the future.

by A135.123

To the developers, when you archive messages, they reappear. There’s several glitches similar to this. ShopifyInbox does a great job allowing you to search your store for products and allowing it to have canned responses. I would like improvement to the AI functions where it doesn’t require an order number if you can look up the customers first and last name, or their email address, or their phone number. This would help when they are looking for a tracking Information, so a live agent does not have to get involved. It would also be great if you can add some other intuitive AI features that would suggest resolutions for the customer.

by O-Town69

I love this chat box. It is super easy to use. It stores all of a customers chap history. The notifications work great for me. I love how easy it is to link a product from you site into the chat. I’m honestly surprised it is a free option from Shopify. It is a great value add to my website

This is a 5 star app EXCEPT, they need to install an availability schedule. The only way I can figure out how to do it currently is to manually switch it to “away”. First, it’s annoying this has to be done manually. And secondly, the customer still thinks your chat is active until they send you a message. This is a bad customer experience. The ability to schedule when the chat is active on the website would make this chat box perfect!

by Lauren1522

ShopifyInbox works great especially for being free. I’m looking to switch from Intercom and save money however, you can’t set store chat hours which is a huge downside.

Needing the chat to send a message after 5pm that says we will be back tomorrow as we get messages in the middle of the night.

I would give 5 stars but the store chat availability is an issue that needs to be fixed. Sounds like a common issue amongst other reviewers so hopefully it’s added to an update soon.

by CalligrapherHolly

Once I figured out how to pay attention to this, I found it helpful. Customers now a days prefer to type rather than call so it gives people quick answers. Also, I appreciate being able to list a few typical big picture questions and answers, that they wouldn’t necessarily see on my site.

by Olivesden

Ever since we added ShopifyInbox to our shop, we have been getting more orders from customers who have questions about our products and they wish to get a response quicker. Ever since then most conversations have converted into sales!

by Paws-A-Bunch

Very disappointed in this version, we seem to have lost access to all our saved replies (without any notice) and have no way of re-creating them nor is ShopifyInbox allowing us to do so. The few that we have been able to recover, keep saying that keyword already exists, but they are not available in the latest version.

Please fix ASAP! We rely on saved replies greatly to provide a lot of info without having to spend the time writing them again and again each time.

by SamAz2012

I don’t usually review apps but after having tried several apps for chat on my website I decided to use the Shopify built in app. I thought it would be better and instead it’s been worse than any other app I’ve used before. It’s a shame as it should’ve been a perfect solution. Now I have to try to find another one.

by Haletree

Ping is a great tool. But with the frequent crashing, especially during crazy holiday time, it can be very frustrating to use. While updates occur frequently, I’m hopeful that each one will address the crashing issues. So far, no luck.

by Bridebeliever

ShopifyInbox is great...if I’m currently looking at my phone. There’s no sound and the notification that someone has messaged me disappears quickly. You have to respond to the customer in the few minutes they are on your website. If you miss it, you lose the sale.

by Joe Aye

Need to be able to send and receive pictures, also needs an iPad app. Glitchy. IG dms need to go in there as well, would like to be able to see all convos, once one of my team members replies, I don’t see the back and fourth anymore. Color coding for who is replied to by which team member who is on the account. Has potential

by DaBikerDude

It functions pretty well. I find the “kit” feature annoying. Biggest issue with it is there is no option to have the customer at least enter there name before they can send s message. Makes it confusing when you get busy keeping them all straight. Would like an option to disable “kit” and most importantly, an option to require (or not) things like (customer full name, email, contact info etc...)

by Bonusblog

Most of the time people are asking questions about a product that they are looking at but don’t tell you because they assume you know. Would it be so hard to include that in ShopifyInbox ?

by SusieqL14

Love the quick notifications for messages from my shoppers! Able to have a super quick response which promotes better sales!

by TTORRES.TR

I really do love ShopifyInbox . It makes emails and promotions so much easier. The only thing I don’t like. Is when ping suggests an action. They say “our store” lol I know it’s a bit trivial but I worked too hard to have an app try to take some kind of ownership.

by MarvinGandis

Is Easy to use. Keep you in touch with customer. Amazing e-mail newsletter. Do all the job for you. Just answer Yes or Not and Profesional Post are immediately made. I ❤️ ShopifyInbox. Is Free. Fast positive result in your next campaign. Try Now!

by Avenida Fashion

Many business use what’s app to get in contact with many customers and buissness I recommend add features to connect Kit with what’s app.