Open any conversation and the right side of the screen fills with cards. This is Arbyn showing its work: every piece of data it looked up before or while drafting a reply, laid out so you never have to leave the conversation to go check Shopify yourself.
What it does
Every card renders only what applies to this specific conversation. Some cards (Customer, Recent orders, Gift cards issued, Quick actions, Priority, Tags) always show, with an honest empty state when there's nothing to report. Others (Order ground truth, Gift card in question, requests in flight, staged changes) only appear when there's something real to show. A return only gets a card if a return is actually happening.
Where to find it
The right column of any open conversation, /app/conversations/<id>. It scrolls independently of the message thread in the center.
Customer identity
The top card, always present, is your at-a-glance read on who you're talking to:
Name and Email: shown separately when both are known, so you never see just an email address standing in for a name you actually have.
Customer account: Exists, None, or Unknown. This tells you whether the email on this conversation matches a real Shopify customer record, a lookup that hasn't run yet, or a genuine "no such customer."
Shipping location: the city, region and country flag for this customer, for example "Clark, Pampanga 🇵🇭". Arbyn prefers the shipping address on the order being discussed, and falls back to the address on the customer's Shopify record when no order is linked yet. It's called shipping location rather than just location on purpose: it's an address on file, not a live signal of where the person is sitting right now, so a gift being shipped to a relative will show the relative's city. The row is hidden entirely for an anonymous chat with no order and no matched customer, because there's nothing honest to put there.
Paying customer: Yes if that Shopify customer has at least one order, No if the lookup succeeded but found zero, Unknown if the lookup hasn't completed.
Order, Channel: the linked order number (if any) and which channel this conversation is on.
Language: the language Arbyn detected the customer writing in, shown as a code (for example
en,fr,pt-BR). This is detected from the customer's own words on every inbound message, regardless of who is handling the conversation. A thread your team took over, one you started yourself from Compose, or a conversation that arrived after your plan's monthly cap was reached all still get a detected language, because the detection runs the moment the message comes in, before anything decides who answers it. It only stays blank when a message is genuinely too short to judge (a single word, an emoji-only reply).Priority and Sentiment: the same values shown as pills on the row in the list, spelled out here.
A badge in this card's header adds more when the customer has ordered before: Returning · N orders, or Not yet a customer / Lookup failed when that's the honest state instead. For a returning customer, four more rows can appear beneath the base list, each only when the data exists: Lifetime spend (their total across every order, formatted in the order's own currency), Customer since, Predicted spend tier, and Segment (RFM). A View in Shopify ↗ link at the bottom opens their real customer record when Arbyn has resolved one.
Orders, gift cards, and order ground truth
Recent orders always renders, listing the last five orders tied to this customer's email across every conversation they've ever had with you, not just this thread. Each row shows the order number, fulfillment and financial-status badges, the total, the date, and a View ↗ that opens the order directly in Shopify. A Load more link pages in additional orders without leaving the panel.
Order ground truth appears only when this conversation has a linked order with a full data snapshot attached (Arbyn's own order lookup already pulled it while working the conversation). When it shows, it covers seven distinct blocks: shipping address, billing address, order discounts applied, fulfillment orders, transactions, the customer's saved addresses, and marketing consent (email and phone, separately). This is the raw material Arbyn's own lookup already fetched. The panel simply stops throwing it away once the reply is drafted.
Gift card in question appears only when this specific conversation is about a gift card Arbyn was able to pin down: the masked code, current balance against the original value, Active/Deactivated status, who it's assigned to, and its expiry (or "No expiry"), with a link into Shopify's gift card admin.
Gift cards issued always renders, and is a running history of every gift card Arbyn has issued to this customer, across every conversation, newest first, with the same Load more paging pattern as Recent orders.
Commerce activity
Conversion events always renders and lists this conversation's own storefront activity in order: cart adds, cart updates and removals, discounts applied or redeemed at checkout, bundles added, reorders, and checkout started/completed, each with its own icon and a one-line summary (product, quantity, running cart total). This is the same event data the inline timeline can show (see the event-timeline article), surfaced here as a dedicated, always-visible card so you don't need to turn anything on to see it.
Browsing history is chat-only, and lists the pages this shopper actually visited on your storefront during their session, newest first, with an icon per page type (product, collection, cart, checkout, home, blog). It's empty on a conversation with no beaconed page views yet.
Requests in flight
Three cards only appear when something is genuinely pending, and all three sit on the escalation-only path. None of them let Arbyn move money or cancel an order on its own:
Return request: appears once a customer has started a return in chat. It tracks the order, the reason they gave, whether a photo was uploaded, and the resolution they asked for (refund, exchange, store credit, replacement), pulling the latest value for each field in case the customer changed their mind partway through.
Refund request / Cancellation request: appears once a customer has asked for either. It shows the order, amount (for a refund), and reason, with a status badge (Awaiting your action, Resolved, or Declined). You process the actual refund or cancellation in Shopify yourself, then use Mark resolved (or Decline, with a reason) here so Arbyn can confirm the outcome to the customer in their own words.
Address change ready: different from the two above. This is a change Arbyn's own reasoning already validated and is holding for your sign-off, showing the from and to address side by side. Approve & apply runs the real Shopify update the moment you click it; Decline rejects it. This card is independent of whatever else is happening in the thread. The customer can keep chatting while it waits for you.
Handling status
A banner card sits near the top of the right panel whenever the conversation needs you to know who currently owns it: Arbyn actively working it (with a Take Over button), a human currently handling it (with Return to Agent), waiting on the customer to reply (informational only, no action needed), or currently snoozed (with the wake time and an Un-snooze button). It stays pinned near the top of the panel rather than at the top of the message thread, specifically so it's still visible while you scroll through a long conversation.
Quick actions, priority, and tags
The Quick actions card has its own article, since it's the one place in this panel where clicking something actually executes real, immediate changes in Shopify. Priority is a simple dropdown (Low/Medium/High/Urgent) that updates the pill everywhere else it shows. Tags lets you attach any of your shop's existing tags, or type a new one and create it on the spot, with a colored swatch per tag.
Related conversations
Appears only when this customer (matched by email) has had other conversations in the last 30 days, up to five, newest first. Each entry shows its ticket number, status, subject, a short preview, channel, and last-activity time; clicking one opens a preview without leaving the conversation you're currently in.
Good to know
Cards that "always render" still show an empty state rather than disappearing. That's deliberate. A blank Recent Orders card tells you clearly "no orders yet," instead of you wondering whether the panel failed to load.
The order ground-truth data is a snapshot from the last time Arbyn looked the order up, not a live poll on every page view. If something changed in Shopify seconds ago, re-open the conversation or check Shopify directly for the freshest state.
A gift card, once deactivated, cannot be re-enabled. That's covered in more depth in the Quick actions article, but it's worth knowing while reading the Gift card in question card too.
FAQ
Why is the Customer card missing the Lifetime spend row? That row (and the three below it: Customer since, Predicted spend tier, Segment) only appears for a returning customer, one Arbyn has actually matched to a Shopify customer with at least one order. A first-time or unmatched contact won't show them.
Why does Shipping location show a different city than where the customer says they are? Because it's the address on file, not a live location. Arbyn shows the shipping address from the order being discussed, or the address on their Shopify customer record. A gift order shows where the gift went, and someone who has moved without updating their address shows the old city. It's there to give you fast context, not to pin down where a person is right now.
Shipping location is missing on some conversations. That row only appears when Arbyn has an address to show: either a linked order with a shipping address, or a matched Shopify customer with an address on file. A brand-new anonymous chat has neither, so the row is hidden rather than shown empty.
The Language row is blank. Why? Either the customer hasn't sent a message yet, or their most recent message was too short for Arbyn to confidently tell one language from another (a single word, an emoji). It fills in the moment a longer message arrives.
Can I edit the order ground-truth data from here? No, it's read-only. It's what Arbyn's lookup found in Shopify at the time. Any correction happens in Shopify itself.
What's the difference between "Refund request" here and the Refund button in Quick actions? The Refund request card tracks a refund the customer asked for in chat, which Arbyn escalated rather than acting on. The Quick actions Refund button is a merchant-initiated refund you run yourself, any time, whether or not the customer asked for one. See the Quick actions article for how that one actually executes.