Documentation
Connecting Shopify
Connecting your store is what makes the rest of Squid Support useful. Once a store is attached to a brand, every conversation arrives with the customer and their orders beside it, and the AI agent can look up real order data instead of guessing.
Two ways to connect
Installing from the Shopify App Store
- Install the app from its Shopify App Store listing.
- Shopify shows you the permission grant screen. Approving it sends you straight into authorisation — there is no form to fill in first, and you are never asked to type your store domain.
- You land on the Choose a brand screen, which asks you to connect this Shopify store to one of your brands, or create a new one. Brands that already have a different store attached are shown as unavailable, with the store they are connected to.
- If you do not have an account yet, this is where you create one. The store you just authorised is carried through, so you never re-enter it.
If you install again later on a store that is already linked to a live brand, you skip the picker and go straight to your dashboard.
Connecting from inside your account
If you already use Squid Support and signed up on our website, connect a store from Settings → Integrations instead. This path exists for merchants who did not arrive through the App Store; the permissions requested are the same.
What permissions are requested, and why
The app requests seven Shopify permissions. Each one maps to something you can point at in the product — we do not request scopes speculatively.
| Permission | What it powers |
|---|---|
read_customers | View customer profiles and order history |
read_orders | View order details and search orders |
write_orders | Cancel orders and update shipping addresses |
read_products | View product information in orders |
read_discounts | Check existing discount codes |
write_discounts | Create discount codes for customers |
read_shopify_payments_disputes | Detect Shopify Payments chargebacks |
Shopify limits apps to orders from the last 60 days by default. Access to older orders is a separate approval that Shopify grants per app ("orders older than 60 days"), so it is not part of the standard grant screen and is not requested until that approval is in place.
What we do with that data
Customer and order data is read to resolve your support requests, and for nothing else. It is never used for marketing, profiling, resale, or to train AI models. Data is processed and stored in the European Union.
The full detail — which subprocessors are involved, how long data is kept, and how to make a data request — is in our Privacy Policy. For a summary in product terms, see Security & privacy.
Adding the chat widget to your theme
Installing the app also makes the chat widget available to your theme as an app embed. Turn it on in the Shopify theme editor under App embeds, then save. No code editing, and no pasting script tags into theme.liquid.
The embed carries two text settings, both labelled advanced — not needed. Leave them empty: the widget works out which brand it belongs to from data written to your store during install. They exist only as overrides for unusual setups.
Appearance, greeting, presence and when the AI answers are all configured on the Squid Support side — see Live chat widget.
Uninstalling and reinstalling
You can uninstall from your Shopify admin at any time. When you do, Shopify notifies us and we clear the store connection from the brand — the domain, the stored access tokens, the granted-scope record and the connection timestamps are all removed. The stored credentials are dead at that point and cannot be reused.
Shopify also sends a shop-redaction request after an uninstall, and we erase the shop's cached customer data on receipt.
Your conversation history in Squid Support is not deleted by an uninstall — it belongs to your Squid Support account, not to the Shopify connection. If you want that removed as well, ask us and we will erase it.
Reinstalling later reconnects cleanly: we keep one record per shop, so a reinstall reuses it and issues fresh credentials rather than creating a duplicate.
Troubleshooting
"Shopify permission missing"
If an action fails because a permission was never granted, Squid Support tells you exactly which one is missing and what it would have enabled — for example that read_customers is needed to view customer profiles and order history.
The fix depends on how your store is connected, and the message names the right one:
- Connected through the App Store — the app has to be re-authorised so you can approve the added permission. Start that from Settings → Integrations.
- Connected with a custom app — grant the scope in Shopify Admin under Settings → Apps and sales channels → Develop apps → your app → Configuration → Admin API scopes, then re-verify permissions in Settings → Integrations.
This is deliberately not treated as a login problem. Re-entering a token or reconnecting cannot grant a permission that was never approved, so the message steers you to the approval step instead.
The store shows as already connected
A brand holds one Shopify store, and a store attaches to one brand. If the brand you want is marked unavailable, it already has a different store — disconnect that first, or pick another brand.
Something else
Email hello@squidsupport.ai with your store domain and what you were doing when it failed.