What is the merchant dashboard?

The place your staff actually works. Open Simple Chat in Shopify Admin and you're in it: the inbox, the conversation views, and the controls for what the AI is allowed to do. Day-to-day support runs here, reading conversations, reviewing what the AI did, stepping in when needed, and tuning how automation behaves.

Chat and email share a single inbox, so staff don't jump between tools to see the full customer story. Conversations are grouped into workflow sections (active work, monitoring, closed threads, spam, and other states your team needs to review), and each thread shows customer and order context alongside the message history, so replies are informed rather than generic.

What staff do here

1. Read full AI and human threads, including what the customer actually sees versus internal-only notes.
2. Search past messages and customers when a return, VIP issue, or repeat question needs history.
3. Take over a thread instantly by sending a customer-visible reply.
4. Pin important customers or conversations so priority work stays at the top of the queue.
5. Manage tickets and follow ongoing issues without losing track of who owns what.
6. Review AI close recommendations and validate or reject resolutions before they're treated as final.

Those controls answer the practical questions: is the AI resolving the right issues, where do we still need people, and what did we promise this customer?

Automation you can actually see

The dashboard exposes automation instead of hiding it. You can tell when the AI is actively handling a conversation versus monitoring and following up automatically. Tool usage, such as order lookups, appears in context so you understand why the AI answered the way it did. Unread indicators on sections show where attention is needed without scanning every thread.

The same workspace is where you shape behavior: support workflows, AI involvement, and the guardrails that keep automation aligned with your policies. Support leads get oversight across channels and agents; agents get customer, order, and message context before replying; operators can track whether AI resolution is improving and where staff intervention still happens. Your team's daily support work should live here, not only in the customer-facing chat widget.