shoppa vs Shopify Inbox for Australian Stores 2026

When choosing shoppa vs Shopify Inbox, choose shoppa when chat volume outgrows your team’s time and you want customers to complete purchases in chat. Choose Shopify Inbox when you get a few chats a day and like answering them yourself. Inbox also has an optional AI agent, so both tools can answer automatically.

shoppa is an AI shopping agent that helps customers find, compare and buy products using your catalogue and store documents. Customers can refine a search across messages, pay in chat and get order support afterwards. Shopify Inbox keeps staff conversations and its optional agent within Shopify’s store tools.

What Shopify Inbox Does

Shopify Inbox is Shopify’s free chat app, with settings and agent conversation reviews in your Shopify admin. Staff reply through the desktop or mobile Inbox app. The conversation view has a message composer and tools to share product links or discount codes.

AI-generated suggested replies help staff draft answers. Where a suggestion is available, a staff member reviews or edits it before sending. Suggested replies support English stores and are separate from the Inbox agent’s automatic answers.

The optional Inbox agent answers from your catalogue, policies and store content. Shopify also documents cited web search for reviews or other product-adjacent information. You can assign the agent all new conversations or only conversations outside staff availability hours. The Inbox agent requires Shopify’s new customer accounts, so stores using legacy accounts need to change accounts before enabling it.

Decision factor	Shopify Inbox	shoppa
Who answers	Staff, or the optional Inbox agent	AI shopping agent, with human handover
Product help	Staff product links or agent recommendations	Conversational search and side-by-side product comparisons
Buying	Inbox agent can add products to the customer’s cart	Customers build a basket and pay in chat
Order status	Inbox agent looks up orders after customer sign-in	Order-number lookup and signed-in order history across devices
Answer sources	Store information, plus product-adjacent cited web search for the agent	Your catalogue and store documents

Staff-Answered Chat Compared With an Agent

Staff-managed Inbox conversations need someone to read and send replies, while shoppa answers automatically from your catalogue and policies. If you enable the Inbox agent, Inbox can answer automatically too. The choice then turns on the shopping workflow you want customers to complete.

shoppa carries the customer’s requirements between messages. A shopper can narrow a product search by colour, then ask for a cheaper option without starting again. Product comparisons show the attributes and trade-offs beside each other. Your live product data and policy documents supply the answers, keeping recommendations within your range.

Consider an illustrative store receiving 40 chats a day. If each staff-handled chat takes three minutes, replies take 120 minutes daily, or ten hours across five days. That assumes active work per chat, excluding the time customers spend waiting.

For an illustrative automated workflow, suppose an agent handles 30 chats and staff handle the remaining ten. Those ten chats take 30 minutes. Add 15 minutes for reviewing agent conversations and the daily total is 45 minutes, saving 75 minutes against the staff-only example.

These are workload assumptions, not measured savings for either product. The same calculation applies to shoppa or an enabled Inbox agent. Complex questions and human handovers still use staff time.

Orders and Order Status

shoppa takes customers from product discovery through basket building and payment in the chat. Customers can then check order status by order number or see their orders across devices when signed in. They can also start and track a return in the conversation.

Shopify’s Inbox agent documentation describes adding recommended products to a customer’s cart and looking up existing orders. Order information requires the customer to sign in. That gives Inbox a useful role in both buying assistance and order support.

The documented Inbox cart action adds items for the customer. shoppa’s purchase workflow includes payment in chat, so the customer can finish the order in the conversation. This distinction matters when your customers need help choosing several products and completing the purchase.

Both tools can move conversations to staff when a customer needs a person. For more detail on the customer questions behind order support, read how to handle where-is-my-order questions.

Cost of Free Chat

Shopify lists Inbox as free, but staff-managed chat still consumes working hours. Its optional agent also changes that calculation by answering automatically. Compare the time your team spends on replies and reviews, alongside the shopping tasks each tool completes.

shoppa has per-session or per-token pricing, quoted for your store. Per-session pricing gives predictable costs as traffic grows. Per-token pricing charges for what the agent uses. shoppa also has a free trial.

For an Australian retailer, the quote must be considered alongside the staff time needed for exceptions and ongoing conversation review. The illustrative 40-chat day shows why staff hours belong in the decision even when the chat app itself is free. Get a quote for shoppa’s pricing for your store.

Choose shoppa or Shopify Inbox

Choose shoppa when chat volume outgrows the time your team can give it and you want shopping and payment in the same conversation. Its search remembers earlier requirements, its answers stay within your catalogue and documents, and customers can continue into order support and returns. Those capabilities suit a store where chat regularly starts with choosing a product and ends with buying it.

Choose Shopify Inbox when you get a few chats a day and like answering them yourself. Its direct access to Shopify store information also makes the optional Inbox agent a practical choice for automated recommendations, cart additions and signed-in order lookups.

If payment and returns in chat decide your choice, choose shoppa. Read how shoppa connects to Shopify for the setup, or compare other Shopify Inbox alternatives if you need a different kind of replacement. You can also browse shoppa comparisons with other tools.