Team inbox
Let your team answer customer chats from any phone or browser, without a Shopify account — invited on WhatsApp, with notifications for new chats.
Sign in
Answer your store's customer chats from any browser. Phone numberInvite a teammate by their WhatsApp number; they set a password and sign in from any phone or browser. No Shopify account, no access to anything but the Inbox.
The people who answer your customers often aren't the people who run your Shopify store. The team inbox gives them the Inbox and nothing else: they sign in with their phone number and a password, answer WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram chats from any browser, and can add it to their phone's home screen like an app — with a notification when a customer writes.
Inviting a teammate
- Open Team inbox
From the Inbox: the chat list's ⋯ menu → Invite your team, or Send an invite on the Inbox banner. The page reads "Let your team answer customer chats without a Shopify account."
- Enter their WhatsApp number
Under Invite a teammate, with the country code — +20 10 1234 5678 — and press Send invite. That's all: they choose their own name when they join.
- They get the invite on WhatsApp
A message with a Join the inbox button. The link works for 7 days.
You can invite your own number too — it's the quickest way to have your chats on your phone.
The invite is a WhatsApp template, so it has to be approved by Meta first. Until it is, the page says "Invites switch on once WhatsApp approves the invite message. This usually takes less than a day." It goes out in your message language, or — with none set — in Arabic to numbers from Arab countries and English to the rest.
If an invite doesn't go
Joining
The Join the inbox button opens Join Olea's inbox. They enter:
- Your name — shown to your team next to the messages they send;
- Phone number — locked to the number the invite was sent to;
- Password and Confirm password — at least 8 characters.
…and press Create account. An invite that's expired or already used says so, and asks them to get a new one from you.
Signing in
The Where your team signs in card on the Team inbox page has the address, with a Copy button — send it to your team. It works in any browser, on a phone or a computer.
- They sign in with their phone number and password.
- They stay signed in for 30 days from the last time they used it.
- After 8 wrong attempts, sign-in waits 15 minutes.
- Forgot the password? You send a reset link from the Team inbox page. Their old password keeps working until they save a new one.
- A number on more than one store's team chooses which store's inbox to open.
On the home screen
Added to a phone's home screen, it opens full screen like an app, named after your store — Olea Inbox. The inbox itself offers to do it, with the steps for that phone:
Notifications
Tap the bell — Turn on notifications — and allow notifications when the browser asks. Inside the home-screen app, the inbox asks by itself: "Get new chats even when the app is closed, so you never miss a customer message."
On iPhone and iPad, notifications work once the inbox is on your home screen. Open it from there and tap the bell. In Safari itself there's no switch.
- A notification comes when a customer message is waiting for a person — not for a COD Confirm or Cancel tap, or anything else an automation answers.
- It shows the customer's name or number (with Messenger or Instagram for those chats) and their latest message. Tapping it opens that chat.
- One notification per chat: a newer message replaces it. The app icon shows how many chats are unread.
- Notifications go to your teammates' devices, never to your Shopify admin. Each person turns them off from their account menu.
What teammates can do
The whole Inbox, on every channel you've connected: reply, send templates and products, use the Inbox AI (from your shared allowance), look up and match orders, create orders from a chat, send payment links, add customers to the waitlist, use quick replies, saved filters, follow-up flags and exports.
They can't invite others, connect channels, change your plan, or open automations, campaigns, settings or billing. When they reach a plan limit, they're asked to have the store owner upgrade.
Their name shows above each message they send, so you can see who answered what, and Analytics has a Team table: messages sent, chats, median reply time, chats solved, orders and sales per person.
Managing your team
Your team on the Team inbox page lists everyone with a status:
Remove access signs them out everywhere at once. The messages they sent keep their name. A teammate can also leave by themselves, with Delete my account in their account menu.