Getting the chat bubble live on your storefront takes two separate switches, and shoppers won't see it until both are on. This walks through both, in order, from a fresh install to your first live chat bubble, plus a real troubleshooting section for when it still isn't showing after you've flipped everything.

Arbyn's chat widget isn't a script you paste into your theme. It ships as a Shopify app embed, a block your theme loads directly, the same mechanism as any other Theme App Extension. That means it needs to be switched on in two different places before it appears:

Miss either one and shoppers see nothing. This article is the activation path, get the bubble showing for the first time. If you've already activated it before and it's disappeared, or Arbyn's own status says it's live and your storefront disagrees, see Why isn't my chat widget showing on my storefront? instead, that article covers the specific case where everything looks correct and it's a stale theme connection under the hood.

Prefer to watch? This interactive walkthrough takes you through the same steps, click by click, in a real Shopify theme editor. You can click through it right here.

If you're still in onboarding, the Agent step's banner button and Settings' Open theme editor button both jump you straight into the App embeds panel with Arbyn already highlighted, so you don't have to find it yourself in the list.

Three ways to check, from quickest to most certain:

Your Command Center (app home) also carries a warning banner if the embed is off, with the same shortcut into the theme editor. It's refreshed by a periodic background check rather than live on every page load, so it can take a little longer to clear than the Settings page after you turn the embed on; check Settings, Chat widget for an instant read.

The theme App embed is the one merchants miss most often, because it lives outside Arbyn entirely. Arbyn's own Show the widget toggle can say on while the embed itself is off in your theme, and nothing will show. Always check the theme editor first if the bubble isn't appearing.

Once the embed is on, Show the widget and its device-level checkboxes (Show on desktop, Show on mobile, under Customize widget, Behavior tab) decide where it shows. Both are checked by default; if you're testing on your phone and only see the bubble on desktop, this is usually why.

Work through these in order if the bubble still isn't showing after Setup above.

Enabled the embed, saved it, and still no bubble. This is almost always the same specific issue: your theme's app embed is connected to a stale extension version rather than the currently deployed one. Shopify silently renders nothing for an embed it can't resolve, no error on the page, no warning in the theme editor, and Arbyn's own status can still say "live" because it's only checking that the toggle is switched on, not that the storefront is actually rendering anything. This cost one real merchant three days of a dark storefront before the fix was found. The fix takes under a minute: in the theme editor's App embeds panel, toggle Arbyn chat off, then back on, then click Save again. This reconnects the block to the current version. Reload your storefront and search page source for arbyn-chat-bubble again.

You edited the wrong theme. If you customized a theme in your Theme library instead of your current published theme, none of your changes reach real shoppers. Go back to Online Store, Themes, and confirm you're editing the theme marked as your live one.

Your storefront is password protected. The password page itself is a Shopify system page, not part of your theme, so the widget won't appear there. It will appear on your actual storefront pages once a visitor is past the password gate, and it's fine to activate and test it before your store goes public. Arbyn checks by loading your storefront the way a customer would, so while the password is on it will tell you it couldn't see the page rather than claiming the widget is fine. That's deliberate. A check that says "looks good" about a page it never managed to load is the thing we most want to avoid telling you.

You have several themes with similar names. If you've duplicated a theme, you may have copies called things like "Copy of Dawn" and "Copy of Copy of Dawn", and only one of them is published. Turning the embed on in the wrong copy changes nothing your customers see, and everything will look correct while you do it. Before you toggle anything, go back to Online Store, then Themes, and check which theme is at the top of the page marked as your live one, then click Customize on that specific theme.

You're seeing a cached page. Both browsers and Shopify's storefront cache pages. Hard refresh (Ctrl+Shift+R or Cmd+Shift+R), or open the storefront in a private/incognito window, before concluding the widget isn't there.

The widget is switched off inside Arbyn. Go to Settings, Chat widget, Customize widget, Behavior tab, and check both Show on desktop and Show on mobile. These are independent; if you only checked one, the other device won't show the bubble even with the embed fully on.

A page-targeting rule is hiding it on the page you're testing. The same Behavior tab lets you hide (or show) the launcher on specific storefront paths, like your cart or checkout pages. If you or a previous setup step added a rule that hides the launcher on the exact page you're checking, that's expected behavior, not a bug. Test a different page, like your homepage, to confirm.

Reply to any email Arbyn has sent you, or email [email protected] directly, and describe what you've already tried from the list above. A real person will look into it.

I toggled the app embed on and saved, but the bubble still isn't there. What's the fastest thing to try? In the theme editor's App embeds panel, toggle Arbyn chat off, then back on, then Save again. This reconnects it to the current version and is the fix for the large majority of "did everything right, still nothing" cases.

Do I need to do anything inside Arbyn itself, or is the theme embed enough? Both. The theme embed loads the widget onto the page; Arbyn's own Show the widget setting (and its desktop/mobile checkboxes) then controls whether it actually displays. Both need to be on.

I can see the bubble on desktop but not on my phone. Is something broken? Check Customize widget, Behavior tab. Show on desktop and Show on mobile are independent switches, and both need to be checked for the widget to appear on both device types.

Can I test activation before my store is open to the public? Yes. A password-protected storefront doesn't stop the widget from loading once the embed is on; it only affects the interstitial password page itself, which is served by Shopify directly, not your theme.

Where do I go if the widget was working and then stopped? See Why isn't my chat widget showing on my storefront?, it covers the ongoing diagnosis case in more depth, including the same theme-editor reconnect fix and every Behavior-tab setting that can hide the launcher after it was previously live.