Beacel for Shopify

How the install works

Shopify handles the installation and asks you to approve the access listed below. Beacel then opens inside your Shopify admin, which already tells it which shop you are in, so there is nothing to sign in to. It only has to make you an account.

1. Open Apps in your Shopify admin and choose Beacel.
2. Type your e-mail and press Send me a code. Beacel e-mails you a 6-digit code that works for 10 minutes.
3. Type the code and press Create my account. This creates your Beacel account and the chat assistant for your shop.
4. Once your plan is set (see below), Beacel reads your shop. It takes about a minute, and you can leave the page open.

Enquiries from your shoppers go to the e-mail you typed. On the same page, Open my Beacel dashboard opens the full Beacel dashboard, and Set a password lets you choose a password for it.

Switch the chat on in your theme

Installing the app does not put the chat on your shop by itself. You switch it on in your theme, as an app embed.

1. On the Beacel page, under Chat on your storefront, press Switch it on. The theme editor opens with the Beacel chat ready.
2. Turn the Beacel switch on under App embeds and press Save.
3. Open your shop. From then on the Beacel page shows when a visitor last saw the chat on your storefront.

Until the switch is on, the Beacel page says the chat has not been seen on your storefront yet, and it shows the same button.

What Beacel reads

Beacel reads only what you have published, and only these parts of your shop:

• Products that are active and on your Online Store: their names, descriptions, prices and variants. Beacel reads the 250 most recently updated.
• Your shop policies, such as returns and shipping.
• Your published pages.
• Your pickup locations.
• The titles of your published collections.

Beacel never reads anything unpublished, and it never reads stock levels, orders or customers. The assistant knows this, so for stock or for an order it sends the visitor to the product page or to your contact details.

To do this the app asks Shopify for four read permissions (scopes) and no others:

• read_products: your products and the titles of your collections.
• read_content: your published pages.
• read_legal_policies: your shop policies.
• read_locations: your pickup locations.

None of the four lets Beacel change your products, pages or policies.

It also reads your shop's name, web address, currency and brand colour, and your contact e-mail only to fill in the sign-up form; the e-mail is not stored.

Beacel keeps the text it read, and the facts it drew from it, as the assistant's knowledge. After you change something in your shop, press Read again on the Beacel page to read it again.

Your plan

The app has no billing yet. For a development store, the Beacel team sets your account's plan, and Beacel starts reading your shop as soon as it is set. You do not need to do anything. The Beacel page shows the plan next to Plan. The Shopify plan for live shops arrives later, and until then the page says Beacel is not available for such a shop yet.

When you remove the app

The chat leaves your storefront together with the app. Shopify tells Beacel to erase the shop's data 48 hours after you remove it. Then the assistant, its conversations and its leads are deleted, and so is the account the app created for you, unless that account has another site or has bought a plan on beacel.com.

Export your leads before you remove the app: open Leads and press Export (see Leads and export). If you install the app again within the 48 hours, nothing is erased.

Data requests from your shoppers

Beacel keeps no customer accounts from Shopify, but someone who chatted with your assistant may also be your customer. When a shopper asks Shopify for their data or for it to be erased, Shopify passes the request on to Beacel. Beacel looks for that shopper's leads by e-mail address or phone number, and takes the conversations they came from with them. For a request for data it e-mails you what it found, but only when it found something. For a request to erase, it deletes the leads it found and the conversations they came from.

There is one limit. A contact that a shopper typed only inside the free text of a chat, without leaving it as a lead, is not found. Chats also leave on their own: Beacel deletes a transcript when the period you set in Keep chats for has passed.