Your first week with live chat: from Starter to your first sale
You've just activated the free Starter plan and the chat widget has appeared on your store. Now what? The first week is the one that decides everything: you don't need to overhaul your site or spend your days glued to the dashboard. You need one clear goal, and just one to begin with — the first conversation that leads to a sale. When you see it happen, when you read a customer typing "ok, bought it" after talking to a real person, everything shifts: you realise the chat isn't just another help channel, it's an extra salesperson working while you do something else.
Starter gives you one agent, 300 chats a month and no card required (product fact): enough to find out, risk-free, whether live conversations really move your numbers. Let's go day by day through what to do to reach that first sale within seven days.
What should you do on the first day after installing?
The first day is for checking that everything works and writing a single welcome message. Nothing more. Open your store in a private tab and confirm the widget loads, the button is visible in the bottom-right corner, and a test message actually lands in your dashboard. If you installed via the WooCommerce plugin or the Odoo snippet and something isn't right, the integrations setup guide walks through each step; for WooCommerce there's also the dedicated piece on how to install the live chat.
Then write the welcome message. It's the first thing a customer reads when they open the chat, and it makes an enormous difference. A "Hi, how can we help?" is technically correct and almost never works. Better something that connects to what the person is doing: "Not sure about the size? Message us, we reply right away." Live chat is the help channel with the highest satisfaction, around 85% (source: iAdvize), precisely because the answer comes from a person in real time — but that only holds if someone opens it. The right message is the one that invites them to.
How do you set up your first proactive messages?
Proactive messages fire on their own when a customer takes a certain action, and they're the fastest way to get that first conversation without waiting for someone to write first. On the second day, spend ten minutes setting up just one: the cart or checkout message.
The logic is simple. Around 70% of carts are abandoned (source: Baymard Institute): that's where most sales are lost, and that's where a well-timed message wins them back. Set up a proactive that fires when the customer stays on the checkout for more than a minute — often they're stuck because of a doubt (shipping, delivery times, a payment method) that a thirty-second answer clears up. Start with one only: if you switch on five the first day, you won't know which one works. You'll find ready-to-adapt copy examples on the proactive messages page, and all the trigger options on the features page.
Which pages should you staff first?
Staff the pages where the customer is closest to deciding first: product page, cart and checkout. These are the hot spots, the ones where a quick answer shifts the purchase. In the early days there's no point spreading attention across the home page or the blog: people there are still exploring, while someone on the product page is already weighing up whether to buy.
A practical priority order for the first week:
- Checkout — the moment of truth. A doubt here is a sale about to slip away.
- Cart — the customer has already chosen, they just need a final nudge.
- Product page — where questions about size, materials and compatibility come up.
Focus your agent and your proactives there. Once you've built confidence you can widen out, but the first chat sale almost always comes from one of these three pages. You'll find the overview of where the chat makes a difference along the buying journey in the features.
How do you cover the hours if you're on your own?
If you're the only agent, the rule is: state the hours you're actually there and staff them for real, instead of faking 24-hour coverage. A widget that promises an instant reply and then leaves the customer waiting does more harm than being switched off. Better two or three concentrated windows — say the lunch break and the evening, when ecommerce traffic rises — where you answer within seconds.
Outside those windows, set an honest message ("We're online 12–2pm and 8–10pm, leave us a message and we'll write back as soon as we're in") so the customer knows what to expect and leaves you their contact. And when Starter starts to feel tight because the hours to cover are too many for one person, there's the Experts Community: operators who staff the chat in the windows you don't cover, so the store is never silent. But that's a good problem to have, and it comes later: in the first week, focus on your best hours.
How do you know if it's working?
Watch three signals, not twenty. In the first week you don't need a dashboard full of charts: you need three numbers to tell whether the direction is right.
- How many chats open per day. If it's zero, the problem is the welcome message or a widget that's hard to see — you're not losing chat sales, you don't have any yet. Fix that first.
- How many conversations touch a product or the checkout. Those are the ones that can close into a sale. If chats open but only talk about returns or tracking, move your proactives onto the buying pages.
- The first sale you can attribute to a conversation. That's the goal for the week. When it arrives, you have proof on your own traffic that the channel works.
From there you do the maths on your own numbers, not on benchmarks: what an average sale is worth, how many conversations it takes to close one, how long it takes you. The ROI calculator helps you project what would happen if you extended your hours or added an agent — useful exactly when that first sale makes you want to go beyond Starter.
Key takeaways
- Day 1: check the widget and write a single welcome message that invites people to open the chat.
- Day 2: set up one proactive message on the cart or checkout, where ~70% of carts are lost (source: Baymard Institute).
- First pages: checkout, cart, product page — that's where the first chat sale is born.
- Hours: declare the windows you're genuinely there; the Experts Community covers the rest when needed.
- Measure: chats opened, buying-stage conversations, first attributable sale. Three numbers, not twenty.
The first chat sale is almost always closer than it looks: there's already someone on your checkout with a doubt just one message away.
