Most of the time, chat waits for a shopper to click it. A trigger flips that around: it opens the widget itself, with a message you've written, when a shopper's behavior matches something you've defined, someone spending 45 seconds on a product page, a cart sitting untouched for a while, or a visitor coming back after a gap.
What it does
A trigger watches for one specific signal on your storefront and, when it fires, opens the chat widget with an opening message you wrote. If the shopper responds, Arbyn can also offer a discount, suggest a bundle, recommend a product or collection, or launch your active quiz right there in that first message.
Where to find it
Go to Sales, Proactive triggers.
Setup (step by step)
Tap New trigger, or pick a starter from the template strip at the top (Cart saver, Home greeter, Product helper, or Winback).
Choose the signal that fires it: time on a page, scroll depth, mouse-leaving-the-page (exit intent), a cart sitting idle, a cart reaching a value, a returning visitor, repeated views of the same product, or general inactivity.
Set Where: which pages it can fire on (any page, or presets for your home page, product pages, collections, cart, blog, or pages), with an option to match the URL exactly, by prefix, by suffix, contains, or a pattern, plus URLs to specifically exclude.
Set Who: new vs. returning visitors, whether their cart has items, desktop vs. mobile, and an optional minimum cart value.
Write What: the opening message the shopper sees, and optionally attach an action if they respond (just chat, offer a discount, offer a bundle, recommend a product or collection, or launch your quiz), plus a message for if they decline.
Set How often: once per browsing session, once per visitor ever, or always with a cooldown in minutes between repeats, and a priority for when more than one trigger could apply at once.
Save. A live plain-English summary at the top of the editor updates as you build, so you can read back exactly what you've configured before you commit to it.
How it works
The eight signals
Time on page (seconds), scroll depth (percent of the page scrolled), exit intent (the shopper's mouse moves toward closing or leaving the tab), cart idle (minutes since the cart last changed while it has items), cart value (a dollar threshold reached), returning visitor (hours since their last visit), repeat product view (they've viewed the same product a set number of times), and inactivity (seconds with no interaction at all).
Offering a discount or bundle
The discount and bundle dropdowns only ever list ones you've specifically turned on for chat, that are currently live in Shopify, and that haven't expired. Anything you see there really will work if the trigger fires and the shopper accepts; there's no way to accidentally attach something dead or hidden.
Templates
Four starting points are built in: Cart saver offers a discount after a cart sits idle for a few minutes, Home greeter welcomes new visitors on your home page, Product helper offers help after someone's spent time on a product page, and Winback welcomes back a returning visitor with a discount.
If your chat widget is off
Triggers can't open a widget that's turned off. If your widget is disabled on both desktop and mobile, this page shows a banner and a shortcut back to your chat widget settings, so it's clear why nothing is firing.
Good to know
URL matching genuinely respects the type you choose. "Starts with," "ends with," "contains," "is exactly," and pattern matching each behave the way they're labeled, so picking "is exactly" for your cart page won't accidentally also fire on every page that merely contains that word.
Duplicate an existing trigger from its row's Actions menu to quickly build a variant without starting over.
An automatic discount can still be attached, but a shopper can't be shown a code for it since there isn't one; Arbyn simply lets them know the price already reflects it.
Priority only matters when triggers could genuinely overlap on the same visit; it doesn't limit how many different triggers can fire across a browsing session.
FAQ
Will a trigger interrupt a shopper who's already in a conversation? No. Triggers open the widget for shoppers who haven't started chatting yet; they don't insert themselves into an existing conversation.
Can I have a trigger fire only once, ever, for a specific shopper? Yes, set How often to "once per visitor," which fires it a single time for that browser regardless of how many sessions they have afterward.
What happens if a discount attached to a trigger later becomes ineligible? The trigger keeps working; it simply stops offering that discount until it's eligible again (live, unexpired, and still turned on for chat).