How to Add a Chat to Your Shopify Store
Shoppers ask the same things at every hour: how long delivery takes, whether you ship abroad, how returns work, what to do about a wrong size. If nobody answers, many of them leave. You can put an AI chat on your Shopify store that answers from your own shipping and returns pages and passes real order problems to your team. OneType has no Shopify app and no native Shopify integration: you paste one script tag into your theme, the same line used on any website. This guide shows where it goes and how to check that it works.
Step 1: Add your store pages and policies as sources
Create your chat and enter your store's address. Choose which pages OneType reads: the shipping policy, returns and refunds, size guides, FAQ and the product pages that matter. Tag, category and pagination pages are flagged so you can skip them. If your product details live in a spreadsheet, upload it as a CSV and the chat can read it as a table. Every answer then cites the page it came from, so shoppers can open your policy and read it for themselves. The chat does not state a price, fee, date or guarantee that your pages do not state.
Step 2: Create the chat and pick a design
Pick one of the chat templates, add your logo, and set the name shoppers see, the greeting and a few starter questions such as "Where is my order?" or "How do returns work?". Open the test chat and ask real questions from your inbox. If an answer is weak, the cause is usually a missing or unclear sentence on your store pages: fix the page, let the chat read it again and ask once more. For rules that must be worded the same way every time, such as return windows, write a saved answer.
Step 3: Paste the script tag in your theme's layout file
After you go live in OneType, your script tag is ready to copy. It is also in your agent's "Add to your website" tab whenever you need it. In your Shopify admin:
- Go to Online Store, then Themes.
- Next to your live theme, click the three dots and choose Edit code.
- Under Layout, open theme.liquid.
- Find the line that says
</body>, near the bottom, and paste the script tag on a new line just above it. - Click Save.
Before you edit a live theme, you may want to duplicate it from the same Themes page, so you can go back if something goes wrong.
Step 4: Allow your store domain
The chat loads only on the domains you allow. Anywhere else it stays blank, even if someone copies your script tag. When you use the Go live step in OneType, you type your store's domain once and it is added for you. If customers can also open your store at another address, add that exact address in the agent's Security settings. Changes to the list take effect once you save them, and you do not need to change the script tag.
Step 5: Test with shipping and returns questions
Open your store in a new tab, using the published address and not the theme editor preview. A chat button appears in the corner, and within about a minute OneType shows "Live on" followed by your site's address, for example "Live on shop.example.com" in the setup flow. You do not have to open the chat for this. Then ask three or four real questions: delivery time, a country you ship to, how to return an item, and one your pages do not answer. The chat should say it does not know and offer the next step you chose, such as a contact form or a person from your team. If nothing shows after ten minutes, check that the line is on the published page, that the address is an allowed domain, that no ad blocker blocks the chat and that you reloaded the page.
Answer shoppers while you sleep
See how it works for stores: AI chat for online stores, check the install steps, or start free.