Merchant Context in the Conversation Sidebar

When a conversation is linked to a Shopify merchant, the contact sidebar shows that merchant’s current plan, MRR, and recent lifecycle events. Your support team can see whether someone is a high-value merchant, a trialing user, or is at risk, without leaving the inbox.

How a conversation gets linked to a merchant

Convot links a contact to a Shopify merchant by matching the contact’s shopify_domain field to one of your synced merchants.

There are two ways this happens:

1. Your widget calls Convot.identify with a signed shop

The recommended approach is to call Convot.identify() server-side with the merchant’s myshopify.com domain and a signed hash, so Convot can trust it:

Convot.identify({
  external_id: "johns-store.myshopify.com",
  name: "John Smith",
  email: "[email protected]",
  shop: "johns-store.myshopify.com",
  shop_hash: "<HMAC-SHA256 of shop using your identity_secret>"
});

The shop_hash is a HMAC-SHA256 signature computed server-side using your app’s identity secret (see Identity verification). Only a signed shop value is trusted for attaching merchant revenue data. Without the signature, Convot will not attach merchant data to the contact, because any visitor could fabricate a domain.

2. Derived from a verified external_id

If you pass a verified external_id that looks like a myshopify domain (and Convot already has a matching merchant synced), it will infer the link automatically. This is a fallback and is only used when the external_id is both present and cryptographically verified.

What shows in the sidebar

Once a contact is linked to a merchant, the conversation sidebar shows a Shopify panel with:

• Plan name and subscription status (trialing, active, frozen, churned).
• MRR - the merchant’s monthly recurring revenue from your app.
• Lifetime value - total gross revenue from this merchant.
• Recent lifecycle events - installs, uninstalls, plan upgrades/downgrades.
• A View in Revenue link that opens the full merchant detail in the revenue dashboard.

Privacy note

Merchant revenue data is visible only to agents who have permission to see it. Revenue access is owner-only by default and must be explicitly granted to admins. Agents never see revenue data.