Shop chat — for your customers only, with images and WhatsApp

A chat that does not turn into a spam box

Putting a chat open to everyone on a shop means opening a public form. After three days it only receives automated messages, and you stop looking at it.

This one is reserved for your signed-in customers. It is the most effective protection there is, and it costs your real customers nothing: a bot would have to create an account, validate it, sign in, and start over for every message. Nobody does that for a shop.

What remains, the account created to cause trouble and repeated sending, is handled by limits you set: messages per hour, maximum length, minimum delay between two sends.

How it looks

A discreet bubble at the bottom of the page. The customer opens it, writes, and sees their past conversations. You reply from a back-office screen that looks like a mailbox: the list on the left, messages on the right, unread ones standing out. A counter tells you how many conversations are waiting.

The customer is emailed when you reply, and you are emailed when they write. Nobody has to sit in front of the screen.

Your opening hours, on show

A chat that does not answer is worse than no chat at all. You declare your opening hours, day by day. Outside them the bubble stays but announces when you reopen: the customer knows what to expect, instead of waiting in front of a silent window.

Images, remade by your own server

A customer can attach a photo, which settles in one image what would take ten lines of description. Every image is read back, checked, resized and re-encoded: the published file is made by your server, never copied.

A script disguised as a photo does not survive the operation, and neither does the location data hidden in photos taken on a phone. The output format is WebP when the server can produce it, otherwise JPEG. The configuration page shows what your server actually does, not what the host advertises.

WhatsApp, if you want it

An optional button opens a WhatsApp conversation on the number you give. No business account to register, no subscription, no fees: it is WhatsApp's public link, the one anyone can use. You can show it on its own, beside the chat, or not at all.

What a customer sees of their data

Their conversations stay in their account and they can read them whenever they like. Closed conversations are deleted, with their images, after the period you set. Nothing lingers on your server indefinitely, and you do not have to think about it.

What it does not do

• It does not talk to visitors who are not signed in: that is the principle, not a limitation.
• It calls no outside service. Your conversations stay on your server and pass through nobody.
• It does not answer for you: no bot, no automatic reply beyond the acknowledgement.
• It does not change your theme: the bubble is placed through a standard hook.

Installation

Upload, install, declare your hours, show the chat. Ten minutes. The module starts switched off, deliberately: a visible chat commits you to answering. A complete manual comes with the module.