Ecommerce & Retail · Conversational Commerce
A public Shopify app that brings a proprietary messaging API into the ecosystem, opening a new customer acquisition channel for merchants.
Outcome
Merchants answer WhatsApp, Messenger and Telegram without leaving the Shopify admin, and stay inside each platform’s rules with pre-approved templates.
A B2B software provider had a powerful unified messaging API, allowing businesses to manage conversations across WhatsApp, Messenger, and Telegram. Their primary market, however, was disconnected from one of the largest potential user bases- e-commerce merchants. These merchants needed to speak with customers on various platforms but were reluctant to adopt tools that pulled them away from their central workspace, the Shopify dashboard.
The core friction was context switching. To answer a customer query, a store owner would have to leave the Shopify admin, find the right conversation in a separate application, and then toggle back to view order details. This workflow was inefficient and created opportunities for delayed responses or lost sales. The client’s technology solved the messaging part of the problem, but it did not solve the workflow part.
Our task was to bridge this gap by embedding the client’s service directly into the merchant's environment. We were responsible for the design and development of a public Shopify application from the ground up. The work involved navigating two complex API ecosystems, handling secure authentication for thousands of potential users, and building an interface that felt native to the platform it served.
The challenge
How we solved it
Technologies
We routed all incoming messages from 3 channels, WhatsApp, Telegram and Facebook Messenger, into a single, clean inbox located directly within the Shopify admin. This gives merchants a central hub for all customer communication, positioned right next to their orders and customer data. By eliminating the need to switch between applications, merchants can respond faster and with more context, improving the quality of their support.
To operate within WhatsApp's business policies, particularly the 24-hour response window, we built a system for creating and managing pre-approved message templates. Merchants can use this feature to send approved notifications, like shipping confirmations or back-in-stock alerts, to customers even after the standard reply window has closed. This ensures merchants can maintain contact while staying fully compliant with platform rules.
How we built it
Bridged the client's platform to Shopify with a durable Laravel service, and handled each channel's rules with templates. WhatsApp, Messenger and Telegram each police what a business may send, and a single inbox that ignores that gets blocked. A template management system lets merchants build and send pre-approved messages per platform, which keeps them compliant without reading policy documents. Authentication runs through Shopify OAuth, a Laravel bridge keeps the two systems in sync, and the interface was built in React with Polaris so it reads as part of the Shopify admin, meeting the requirements for a public App Store listing.
In the client's words
“Merchants would not leave the Shopify admin for us, so we went to them. The template system is why we do not get accounts blocked.”
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