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How to Set Up the Gorgias Chat Widget on Shopify
Live chat is the fastest path from a curious Shopify shopper to a paying customer, and Gorgias Chat puts that conversation right on your storefront — a bubble in the corner that turns a hesitant "will this ship before Friday?" into a sale, and every question into a ticket your team already knows how to work. But a chat widget is only as good as its setup: connect it to the wrong store, leave the targeting loose, or ignore what happens after hours, and you end up with a launcher nobody trusts and offline messages nobody catches. This guide walks through installing the widget on your Shopify theme, dialling in appearance and targeting, handling online and offline behaviour, and wiring chat through to tickets — step by step, honest about where a step is add-on or Shopify-gated.
What the Gorgias chat widget actually does
The Gorgias chat widget is a launcher that lives on your storefront and feeds directly into your help desk. When a shopper opens it and sends a message while your team is online, Gorgias opens a chat ticket an agent can pick up in real time. When your team is offline, the same widget shows an offline capture form that creates an email ticket instead — so a 2am "where's my order?" doesn't vanish, it lands in the queue for the morning. Every conversation becomes a ticket, which is the whole point: chat, email, and social all land in one timeline rather than in a separate inbox you have to babysit.
Chat itself is available on all Gorgias plans, but a few of the flashier layers are gated. Setting it up is limited to account owners and admins, per Gorgias' chat setup documentation. And as you'll see, the self-service and proactive-campaign features that make chat feel "smart" require an AI Agent subscription and a connected Shopify store. If you want the conceptual tour before the wiring, Gorgias Chat explained and the Gorgias chat widget explained cover the shape of it; this piece is the hands-on install.
Step 1: Create the chat and connect your Shopify store
Everything starts in one place. Go to the Settings icon (bottom-left) → Channels → Chat → + New chat. This opens the New Chat wizard, and step 1 is the fork in the road that trips people up.
- Enter a Chat title and pick your default language (add more with + Add language if you sell across regions).
- Under "Choose where you'll install your chat," select Ecommerce platforms — this is the option for Shopify, Magento, and BigCommerce.
- In the Connect a store step, select your Shopify store from the dropdown. This is required: the theme-embed / install step stays locked until a store is connected.
- Choose your availability mode — Allow live chat messages for real-time chat, or offline capture for email-only.
- Click Continue.
As the screenshot above shows, this really is step 1 of the live install wizard — and the "Connect a store" requirement is not a formality. Until Gorgias can see your Shopify store, it can't inject the widget into your theme, so if you're evaluating chat on a fresh account with no store attached, the install steps below will appear greyed out. Connect the store first.
Step 2: Install the widget on your Shopify theme
Once the store is connected, Gorgias offers two install paths — and the right one depends on how standard your storefront is.
- Quick install for Shopify (1-click) is the default and the one most stores should use. Select Quick install, click Install, and you'll be redirected to Shopify in a new tab where you click Update Permissions in the top-right corner. Gorgias then injects the widget into your theme automatically. Per Gorgias' 1-click installation notes, this method means the chat won't disappear if you later edit your theme.
- Install manually is for the edge cases: showing chat only on specific Shopify pages, a Shopify Headless build, BigCommerce or Magento 2, or firing the script through Google Tag Manager. You drop the provided snippet into your theme's
theme.liquid(via Online Store → Themes → Edit code), just inside the<body>tags.
One honest gotcha worth flagging: re-running quick install re-injects the widget in its default state and wipes any advanced HTML customization you added by hand. If you've hand-tuned the widget with custom CSS/HTML snippets, don't casually re-run the 1-click installer — you'll lose that work.
Step 3: Set the appearance
With the widget live, tune how it looks under the Appearance tab of your chat integration (Settings → Channels → Chat → your chat → Appearance). Per Gorgias' appearance documentation:
- Set a Brand color (hex or picker) — it's applied to both the widget header and the launcher button. Leave it blank and Gorgias defaults to blue.
- Choose a launcher position: bottom-right (default), bottom-left, top-right, or top-left, with pixel offsets if the default collides with a cart drawer or a cookie banner.
- Upload a Home page logo (PNG, JPG, or GIF, max 500 KB) — a horizontal logo on a transparent background reads best.
Small things matter here. A launcher that overlaps your "Add to cart" button on mobile costs you conversions, so preview it on a phone before you call it done.
Step 4: Targeting, business hours, and offline behaviour
This is where a widget goes from "always on, always annoying" to "shows up at the right moment." Under the Preferences tab, Gorgias' chat preference settings give you three visibility toggles and an availability mode:
Where chat appears — three toggles:
- Show chat — the sitewide on/off switch.
- Show chat outside of business hours — hide the launcher entirely when you're closed, or keep it visible for offline capture.
- Show on mobile — control whether mobile shoppers see it at all.
Chat availability — three modes: live when agents are available (chat only goes live if staff are logged in), always live during business hours, or offline capture only. Gorgias also communicates wait time — dynamic (based on real response speed) or static ("in a few minutes" / "in a few hours"). If the estimated wait exceeds 15 minutes, shoppers get the option to wait or switch to the offline email form.
Offline appearance — a detail teams miss: unless you tell it otherwise, the chat icon and main colour go grey outside business hours. If you'd rather keep your brand colour on 24/7, check the "Keep main color when outside business hours" option.
For true page-level targeting — say, showing chat only on product and cart pages — the clean route is the manual install on specific pages (Step 2), since the standard toggles are sitewide plus a "hide on specific pages" option after quick install.
Where the native widget stops — and where an AI layer picks up
Gorgias Chat is genuinely strong at what it does: it installs cleanly on Shopify, routes every conversation into your help desk as a ticket, and handles the online/offline handoff without fuss. But be clear about what the base widget is — a transport layer. It carries the message from storefront to agent; it does not, on its own, answer the message.
Two capabilities that make chat feel intelligent are add-on and Shopify-gated. Proactive chat campaigns — the on-site nudges like "free shipping over $50" — live inside Convert, which requires a connected Shopify store. And self-service Flows (the AI Agent that resolves WISMO, returns, and subscription questions inside chat without an agent) require an AI Agent subscription and, currently, Shopify specifically. Gorgias' AI Agent and Flows are capable, but Gorgias bills its AI on a per-resolution model — you pay each time the agent closes out a conversation, which couples your bill to volume in a way that can surprise you at scale.
This is the seam where a dedicated AI agent layer fits, and it's worth understanding the broader category of AI agents for customer service before you commit. Macha is one such layer: it runs on top of the Gorgias you already use as a native connector — it does not replace Gorgias, your chat widget, or your help desk. You keep the Gorgias install exactly as configured above; Macha reads and writes the same tickets your chat creates. It drafts or sends grounded replies to WISMO, returns, and subscription questions by looking up live order and account status through a custom tool that turns your Shopify or ERP REST API into something the agent can call — so the after-hours offline form gets replaced by an actual answer.
The billing contrast matters too: Macha's credits are consumed per AI action, not per resolution. Automation is messy — an agent might read an order, check a policy, and post a reply across several actions, or it might tee up a draft a human sends — so pricing per discrete action is honest about what actually happened, rather than assuming every touch is a clean "resolution." Keep Gorgias Chat as the storefront transport and system of record; layer an agent on top for the reasoning the widget can't do alone. New to the platform underneath all this? What is Gorgias is the primer.
FAQ
Where do I set up the Gorgias chat widget for Shopify? Go to Settings → Channels → Chat → + New chat. In step 1, choose Ecommerce platforms (the Shopify/Magento/BigCommerce option) and connect your Shopify store — the theme-embed install step stays locked until a store is connected.
Quick install or manual install — which should I use? Use Quick install for Shopify (1-click, via Update Permissions in Shopify) for a standard storefront; it survives theme edits. Use manual install only for specific-page targeting, Shopify Headless, BigCommerce/Magento, or Google Tag Manager. Note that re-running quick install wipes any hand-added HTML customization.
What happens when my team is offline? When chat is offline, the widget shows an offline capture form that creates an email ticket for your team to work later. You can also hide the launcher entirely outside business hours, and by default the icon turns grey unless you check "Keep main color when outside business hours."
Does every chat become a ticket? Yes. Every chat conversation creates a ticket in your Gorgias help desk, so chat, email, and social all land in one timeline rather than a separate inbox.
Can I add AI to Gorgias Chat without replacing Gorgias? Yes. An AI agent layer like Macha connects to Gorgias as a native connector and runs on top of your existing chat widget and help desk — it doesn't replace them. It answers WISMO, returns, and subscription questions with grounded replies, while Gorgias stays the system of record. Macha's credits are billed per AI action, not per resolution.
Ready to turn after-hours chats into real answers instead of offline forms? Start a free trial of Macha and connect it to your Gorgias in minutes.
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