Add a widget

On the Engagement Widgets page, choose New widget. You land on a catalog of formats grouped into three sections (Floating, Inline, and Custom), each card carrying a schematic of where that format lands on a page, its name, and its technical slug: the internal identifier, shown so it lines up with what the tag and the CSS contract call the same thing.

Selecting a card creates the widget straight away. There is no form to fill in and nothing to save: you land on the new widget's own page with its Name ready to be replaced (it starts as the format's own name: "Chat bubble", then "Chat bubble 2" if that one is taken), where you also set its look and where it shows. Pick the wrong one and nothing is live: delete it from the ··· menu on its row in the list, or change its format from the widget's own page.

The formatsCopy Anchor Link

Within Floating and Inline, the format we recommend starting with leads its section (Question bar in Floating, Starter questions in Inline), and a Coming soon card never precedes one you can actually create.

A Coming soon card is inert: it can't be clicked, and it can't be reached with the keyboard. It's on the page so you can see which formats are on the way, not to be selected.

The Custom widget card is the exception in the other direction: it isn't coming soon, and it doesn't create anything. Building your own surface already works today, so the card is a link to Style engagement widgets with CSS, which covers the CSS contract and points at the tag's open command.

What a new widget starts asCopy Anchor Link

Creating a widget writes two things: the widget itself, and its first version, a draft.

• Active. The Active switch on the General tab is already on.
• Already targeting somewhere, in the way that makes sense for its format: a Question bar or Chat bubble arrives with Show on all pages on; a Button or Starters widget arrives with all four page types checked (the closest an inline format gets to "everywhere"; see An inline widget needs page types for why it can't have an actual "all pages" mode).
• Nothing published. The first version is a draft, so the widget's status is Never published and the tag has nothing to serve for it. This is the one thing standing between a new widget and your shoppers.
• Starter questions off, on a Question bar or Chat bubble. A new one shows no starter-question chips until you turn Show starter questions on, on the Content tab, and publish. A Starters widget has no such switch: showing questions is what the format is.
• Every appearance field inherited, so it already follows your site's branding without a single field set.
• No mount point, for a Button. Nothing is guessed about your storefront: the widget arrives on the CSS selector mode with the selector empty, and its draft won't save until you fill it in and add a label. See Place an inline button on your pages.

Publishing is the one deliberate gate left: nothing unconfigured reaches a live storefront without it, whatever else is already set. The widget's page tells you when that's still the unmet condition. See Why a new widget isn't live yet.

If creating the widget fails, you're returned to the catalog with a visible error rather than to a catalog that looks as though the click never registered, and no half-created widget is left behind.

Picking the wrong format isn't a dead endCopy Anchor Link

A widget's format is editable from the widget's own page, at the top of the Design tab, through the same draft path as every other setting. See Changing a widget's format.