Engagement widgets

An engagement widget is a site-scoped surface that invites a shopper into a conversation on your storefront, rendered by the web tag. Four formats can be created today:

• Question bar: a centered, bottom-docked text field. A shopper types a question and sends it (click the arrow or press Enter); this opens the conversation panel and sends what they typed as the first message, without an extra click to open it first. At rest it shows no chip and types your starter questions into its field. It engages when the shopper focuses it, and folds into a bubble on a phone after a scroll. See The question bar.
• Chat bubble: a floating round button docked to one corner of the screen. Clicking it opens the conversation panel.
• Button: a labelled control inside your own content flow, at a point you declare, rather than against a corner of the viewport. See The inline button.
• Starters: a composite card inside your own content flow: a heading you can switch off, up to three of your site's starter-question chips, and a free-text field. See Starters.

The first two are floating: they are positioned against the viewport, and you set their offsets. The button and Starters are inline: each one's position is a mount point in your markup, which changes what you configure and adds one requirement. See Place an inline button on your pages.

A site can have zero, one, or several widgets of either format, each with its own name, its online or offline state, and page-type targeting.

Open Engagement → Widgets in the dashboard sidebar for a site, or go to /dashboard/sites/{siteId}/engagement-widgets.

One thing stands between creating a widget and a shopper seeing itCopy Anchor Link

A new widget is created online and already targeting somewhere sensible for its format: every page for a chat bubble or question bar; Home, Category and Product for a button or Starters. What it doesn't have is a published version: it has nothing published, so nothing is served until you publish, whatever else is already set. See What a new widget starts as.

An inline widget has one more requirement of its own: it needs a mount point, and a button also needs its label. Its draft won't save without them. A Starters widget's draft also won't save with its heading empty in any of your site's languages, unless you switch the heading off.

The widget's own page names whichever one is still unmet, one at a time. See Why a new widget isn't live yet.

Where to go nextCopy Anchor Link

• The widget list: what is actually running on your site, and the row actions that change it.
• Add a widget: the format catalog and what a new widget starts as.
• The widget editor: the header with the status tag, Save and Go live or Take offline, and what lives in each of its seven tabs.
• Widget performance: one widget's own funnel, its engagement rate, and a version-over-version comparison.
• Drafts, publishing and versions: how a change reaches your storefront, which versions are locked, and how to start a new version from one that worked.
• Preview: the preview scene, your own storefront behind it, and the short-lived link that shows a draft on the real thing.
• Appearance and placement: colours, size, corners, shadow, icon, text, offsets and stacking order.
• Page-type targeting: where a widget is allowed to render.
• The inline button: the format that renders inside your own content, and what it configures instead of offsets.
• Starters: the composite heading-plus-chips-plus-field format, and how it differs from the button.
• Place an inline button on your pages: the three mount modes, ranked, and what each one costs; shared by the button and Starters.
• Starter questions: the tappable questions a floating format can show above itself, or Starters inline, written once for the whole site.