LiveChat for Ecommerce: Shopify Selling, Carts and Chat Sales

LiveChat, now sold to new customers as Text plans, fits online stores that want chat to sell, not only to answer questions. The cheapest way in is Essential at $19 per user per month billed annually, or $25 per user per month billed monthly ^[1]. The selling layer is included. Every Text plan carries the AI sales skill, a live Shopify catalog, cart recovery campaigns, live cart preview, a checkout chat widget (on Shopify Plus stores) and buying-intent detection. Two limits matter more than the seat price: AI resolutions are capped per account a month (10 on Essential, 200 on Growth), and sales reports credit a chat only for orders within 7 days (from November 2026).

What a shopper sees inside the chat

When the AI Agent recommends a product, it arrives as a card with a photo, the price, an add-to-cart button and a photo gallery. On Shopify, shoppers pick a size or color and add the item to the cart without leaving the chat, with nothing to configure. The AI Agent checks stock and only suggests products that can ship. It can also share a predefined discount code on request. Conditional offers, such as a code tied to cart value, need a Custom Skill first. Nothing is automatic there.

Proactive selling runs through campaigns. Conversion Radar is live on every account and flags nine sales and lead moments, from browsing and comparing products to returning to a cart, each paired with a matching campaign ^[2]. Those campaigns use AI-personalized copy by default when a team has an AI Agent enabled, and you cannot edit them. Plan limits bite here. Essential allows 3 campaigns and 1,000 impressions a month and tracks 50 live visitors at once. Growth allows 30 campaigns, 10,000 impressions a month and 400 visitors.

How deep each store platform goes

Shopify gets the full set. Text installs from the Shopify App Store through the Theme Editor without code. Installed that way, Text is billed through Shopify every 30 days; Text says signing up directly makes annual billing cheaper. The widget runs on the storefront and the Thank you page on every Shopify plan, while chat on the checkout page itself needs Shopify Plus, because Shopify allows checkout customization only there. Agents see the live cart, the last order and historical spend, and Inbox lists show an active-cart badge with the cart value. Opportunity Cohorts, which turn a live buying signal into a campaign for the matching visitors, work for Shopify customers only.

Stores off Shopify feed the AI Agent a catalog in one of two ways. A Google Shopping or Merchant Center XML feed re-syncs every hour with no code. The Product Directory API takes JSON files up to 50 MB, needs only new or changed products and allows one catalog per organization, shared by every AI Agent. Since October 2026, tickets also show total spent, total orders and recent orders for Shopify, WooCommerce and custom stores.

The support side: order questions, returns and handoffs

Where-is-my-order questions are the classic store ticket. On Shopify, the AI Agent answers them from live store data without a human, along with shipping times and product availability. Other stores need a Custom Skill that calls the merchant's order system through a webhook. Returns, refunds and cancellations depend on the process you configure ^[3]. Order changes happen in the Shopify admin, or through configured automations that run supported Shopify actions such as Get Customer Orders or Update Order. Plan returns around a human.

When the AI Agent hands over, the first available teammate or a chosen team receives the transcript, cart and profile. If nobody is online and the fallback is set, the chat becomes a ticket. After hours, the AI Agent keeps answering on website chat, WhatsApp, Messenger, Instagram and SMS, the last through your own Twilio account. Agents away from the desk follow live carts and order events in the mobile app. On an iPhone 14 or newer, a sales Live Activity shows the day's sales for ecommerce accounts.

The team tools a growing store leans on start on Growth: routing rules by page URL, domain, country or channel, working hours, chat supervision and takeover, chat summaries, multilingual agent groups and unlimited history. Essential keeps conversation and file history for 60 days. That matters for warranty questions. Klaviyo skills pass profiles and cart events into your email flows, and a Shopify template turns chat details into a customer record when a conversation ends. Text itself sends no email campaigns.

Measuring what chat sells

Text reports chat revenue in three views. The Sold section lists AI Agent chats where an order was placed while the chat was open. The All Sales report counts orders during a chat or within the attribution window afterward, from humans or the AI Agent, grouped by team, teammate or agent type. The AI Agent Sales report covers only chats the AI Agent handled. Metrics are total value, total orders and average time to order, and sales reports are on every plan.

The window changed. For orders from November 2026, Text credits a chat only for purchases within 7 days ^[4]. Earlier data keeps the old window and is not recalculated, so a report spanning both periods may show a step change. Older pages still show the longer window. Ignore them. Text says most chat-linked orders happen within 7 days anyway, and Shopify order data syncs once a day. Other stacks track sales through one API call fired from the order-complete page, a developer install rather than a one-click connector, with order events deduplicated automatically.

What a store pays, by our arithmetic

Text bills per user per month: Essential costs $19 billed annually or $25 billed monthly, and Growth costs $79 billed annually or $99 billed monthly. Both plans include the same selling features; campaign, visitor and AI limits differ. AI resolutions are counted per account a month, 10 on Essential and 200 on Growth, and extra packs cost $49.50 per 50 resolutions, or $0.99 each. Packs recur every cycle until you reduce them at renewal, and unused resolutions never carry over. A store that installs from the Shopify App Store is billed through Shopify every 30 days; Text says signing up directly makes annual billing cheaper. Our AI playbook explains what counts as a resolution.

By our arithmetic, a one-person store on Essential that needs about 100 AI resolutions a month pays $19 plus two packs at $99, or $118 a month at the annual rate. That same solo user pays less on Growth: $79 per user per month billed annually, with 200 resolutions included. Essential plus two packs only comes out ahead from two users ($137 against $158 a month, both billed annually).

A store needing about 200 resolutions should compare two paths: Essential plus four packs adds $198 a month, while Growth adds $60 per user per month billed annually or $74 billed monthly. Billed annually, Growth wins for one to three users ($60, $120 or $180 extra), and from four users Essential plus packs costs less. Billed monthly, Growth wins only for one or two users ($74 or $148 extra); from three users ($222) Essential plus packs costs less. The cheaper path lacks routing, supervision or unlimited history.

Downgrades and removed users take effect only at renewal with no credit, and refunds are reviewed case by case on request, according to Text's HelpDesk.com pricing page for the same plans; our pricing guide covers billing in full. Existing LiveChat customers keep their plan and price, but Text's AI Agent and its AI selling features, such as product cards and Conversion Radar, are not part of legacy LiveChat plans. A store on the LiveChat app gets them only by moving to Text, which can run as a trial side by side. That move is the real decision.

What stores report, and how to read it

The vendor chose these stories. Text's customer story says Nuvoo, a refurbished-computer seller, grew AI Agent sales 432% in four months, with about 70% of chat sales going through the AI Agent and a 98% AI Agent resolution rate. Text's customer story says Selsey grew AI Agent-assisted orders 215% in three months, with 96% of conversations resolved by the AI Agent and a $628 average AI-assisted order. Text's customer story says Experiences by Wembley Stadium added over $1.5M in revenue in its first eight months from chat-started sales.

Text's customer story says Hairlust runs Text on all 13 localized country domains, with 800K monthly unique visitors and 15K monthly orders. Text also says, as a vendor claim without a cited study, that shoppers who chat convert at 266% higher rates than shoppers who only browse. Treat these as ceilings, not forecasts. Measure your own baseline first. The 14-day trial of Essential or Growth needs no card and never charges automatically. A Shopify-only store handling mostly tickets should also price Gorgias, which bills per account by billable tickets a month rather than per user.

The bottom line

For a store that wants chat to close sales, Text puts the whole selling layer on every plan: product cards with variants and add to cart, cart recovery, buying-intent campaigns and revenue reports. Shopify sellers get the deepest version, WooCommerce stores nearly as much, and BigCommerce or headless stacks need an API connection and a developer. Pick Essential for a small team with light AI volume; move to Growth when you need routing, supervision or unlimited history, or about 200 AI resolutions a month with three users or fewer on annual billing (two or fewer billed monthly). Keep returns with people, and judge results on the 7-day window.