How to Add a Live Chat Plugin to Your Online Store: Boost Sales and Customer Engagement Worldwide

Independent websites have become an increasingly popular choice for cross-border e-commerce, offering businesses full control over website design, functionality, and customer data. However, one challenge many businesses face is effectively communicating with customers in real time. Without a chat plugin, response times are slow, customer inquiries go unanswered, and potential sales are lost.

By integrating a live chat plugin, businesses can enhance customer service by enabling instant automated responses and seamless human follow-ups. This not only improves response speed but also significantly reduces cart abandonment rates. In this guide, we’ll explore the benefits, use cases, installation steps, and optimization techniques for adding a chat plugin to your independent website, helping you engage customers more effectively and boost conversions.

Why does an independent website need a chat plugin?

Effective customer communication is a key challenge for independent website operators. Without a chat plugin, potential customers may struggle to find a way to reach out, resulting in lost sales opportunities due to poor customer service. A live chat plugin addresses this issue by providing a direct and efficient communication channel.

1. Improve customer communication efficiency

Through the chat plug-in, users can communicate with customer service in real time directly through the chat window. The timeliness of the chat plug-in can reduce response time and enhance customer satisfaction.

2. Improve conversion rate

Instant responses help resolve customer concerns quickly, reducing hesitation and increasing the likelihood of purchase completion. Automated bots can handle common inquiries, while human support can take over complex cases.

3. Improve the SEO ranking of independent sites

In the operation of independent websites, SEO ranking directly affects the natural exposure of independent websites in Google searches. One of the important criteria for Google to evaluate the SEO ranking of independent websites is the time users stay on the website. After adding a chat plug-in to the independent website, enterprises can use AI chatbots to attract users to interact more on the independent website, increase their stay time on the website, and thus improve the SEO performance.

4. Support diverse social media platform engagement

Many customers prefer using social media for communication. Chat plugins can integrate with platforms like WhatsApp, Messenger, and Line, allowing businesses to redirect conversations and build stronger customer relationships.

5. Multi-language support

Cross-border e-commerce independent sites often have users from all over the world, so multi-language support is essential. Chat plug-ins can automatically identify and translate messages sent by customers and translate reply messages into the language used by customers, eliminating language barriers and reducing corporate employment costs.

Key Use Cases for a Live Chat Plugin

In actual usage scenarios of users and enterprises, when will users and enterprises use chat plug-ins? Here are some specific usage scenarios:

Pre-sales support: Solve user questions in real time

When customers browse cross-border e-commerce independent websites, they may not be able to fully understand the product features, prices or event information through the content on the page. When they want to learn more about the product, the chat plug-in provides them with a direct communication channel, allowing customers to learn about the company's products without adding friends, reducing the intermediate steps for users to understand the company's products, accelerating users' decision-making speed, and reducing customer churn.

After-sales support: improving user satisfaction

After purchasing a product, users may want to know the logistics situation, or need certain after-sales support (return or exchange or product usage issues). At this time, customers can quickly contact after-sales customer service through the chat plug-in to solve the problem, without having to wait for after-sales service through cumbersome contact methods such as email.

Promotions & events: boosting engagement

During Black Friday or other big promotions, a large number of customers visit the company's independent website, hoping to buy some discounted products, but they don't know what discounts or promotional products the company has. At this time, you can use the chat plug-in's preset automatic reply or display discounts in the chat plug-in's bulletin board to guide users to specific event pages, clearly convey discount information, and encourage users to place orders.

Steps to install the chat plugin on an independent site

The steps to install the chat plugin vary depending on the independent website building platform used by the enterprise. The following takes Shopify as an example to demonstrate the tutorial for installing the chat plugin on an independent website. If the enterprise builds its own independent website on other website building platforms such as ShopLazza, ShopLine, WordPress, BigCommerce, OpenCart, UEESHOP, Shopyy, etc., you can view the tutorial for installing the chat plugin at this link: How to add a chat plugin to an independent website? -SaleSmartly-Help Center-SaleSmartly User Guide.

We’ve also put together a list of integration guides for major website builders to help you connect your independent store with SaleSmartly more easily.

Shoplazza	Shoplazza-SaleSmartly Help Center
Shopline	Shopline - SaleSmartly Help Center
WordPress	WordPress - SaleSmartly Help Center
Shopify	Shopify - SaleSmartly Help Center
BigCommerce	BigCommerce - SaleSmartly Help Center
OpenCart	OpenCart - SaleSmartly Help Center
UEESHOP	UEESHOP - SaleSmartly Help Center
oemsaas	oemsaas - SaleSmartly Help Center
MeShop	MeShop - SaleSmartly Help Center
Shoptop	Shoptop - SaleSmartly Help Center
ZenCart	ZenCart - SaleSmartly Help Center
Shopyy	Shopyy - SaleSmartly Help Center
LeadongShop	LeadongShop - SaleSmartly Help Center
FunPinPin	FunPinPin - SaleSmartly Help Center
XShoppy	XShoppy - SaleSmartly Help Center
Squarespace	Squarespace - SaleSmartly Help Center
Google Tag Manager	Google Tag Manager- SaleSmartly Help Center
BelikeShop	BeikeShop-SaleSmartly Help Center

1. Install viathe Shopify app

(1) Log in to Shopify, [Apps] - [Add App] - [Shopify App Store].

(2) Enter the search page and enter [SaleSmartly] - [Install].

(3) Enter the application authorization page and click [Install] again.

(4) Register a SaleSmartly account. After completing the SaleSmartly account registration, you can check the successful installation of the plug-in Shopify store site in the SaleSmartly backend [Settings] - [Chat plug-in].

2. Install via JavaScript code

(1) Create a plugin in SaleSmartly

①Register and log in to SaleSmartly - [Integration] - [Chat Plugin] - [Create Plugin] - [Plugin Configuration] to edit the desired style of the enterprise chat plugin.

②After the plugin is created, return to [Chat Plugin] — [Copy] Installation code.

(2) Install SaleSmartly on Shopify store

① After logging in to Shopify, go to [Online Store] — [Template], click [Action] — [Edit Code] to enter the code editing page.

② On the code editing page, click [layout] — [theme.liquid] to enter the file code input box.

Paste the JavaScript code you just copied and click Save to successfully install it.

Common Customer Service Challenges and How to Fix Them

Even with a chat plugin installed, many businesses still face similar problems. Here’s how to diagnose and solve them:

Challenge	Cause
Too many messages to handle	No chatbot or auto-routing setup
Can’t understand multilingual messages	No instant translation feature
Losing potential leads	Customer data not synced to CRM
Disconnected sales, support, and operations	Tools not integrated
Missed messages overnight	No auto-reply or shift scheduling

How to optimize the effect of the chat plug-in

To make the independent site's chat plug-in more valuable, it is necessary to continuously adjust its functions based on user feedback, improving the user experience and the service efficiency of manual customer service.

1. Regular data analysis

Use the built-in data analysis function of the plug-in to analyze visitor behavior data, quickly distinguish new and old customers, and better formulate marketing strategies. You can also use the data to fully understand the service level and work efficiency of online customer service, so as to train employees better.

2. Optimize automated speech

Set trigger conditions based on keywords that users frequently ask, and adjust automatic reply scripts promptly to ensure that the reply information is close to users' needs and enhance the user interaction experience.

3. Keep Features Updated

Check the new features of the chat plug-in promptly. The chat plug-in developers update these features based on the needs of other cross-border e-commerce independent sites, which can help independent sites better manage user interactions and improve conversion rates. Enterprises can timely understand the uses of new chat plug-in features according to their own operational needs and apply new features that suit them to the actual scenarios of independent sites, thereby continuously optimizing and improving operational results.

4. Optimize Team Collaboration

Plan support schedules across time zones and assign conversations effectively. Proper routing ensures every customer gets a timely response and prevents message backlogs.

SaleSmartly offers a complete intelligent support solution, unifying conversations across websites and social platforms, providing real-time translation, AI chatbots, customer profiling, and multi-agent collaboration.

Whether you run a DTC brand, online shop, or B2B website, SaleSmartly helps you handle every conversation efficiently, improving response time, team productivity, and sales conversion.