Quick actions is the one card in the right-hand panel where clicking a button does something for real, immediately, in Shopify. It's the deliberate override lane for when you want to act on a conversation yourself rather than waiting on the agent.

Ten buttons, split into two groups, each opening a focused form: Order actions (Issue refund, Cancel order, Edit address, Reship) and Sales actions (Issue discount, Issue gift card, Create bundle, Send upsell, Deactivate gift card, Issue store credit). Submitting any of them runs the real Shopify mutation right then. A refund is actually issued, an order is actually cancelled, a discount code actually exists the moment you click Send.

The Quick actions card in the right-hand panel of any open conversation, below the customer's handling-status banner.

These bypass Arbyn's own reasoning entirely. The card's own subtitle says it plainly: "Manual actions you take on this conversation. Bypasses Arbyn (no AI involvement)." Every button opens a modal, you fill in what it asks for, and submitting calls the matching Shopify mutation directly. There is no draft, no review step, and no agent judgment call anywhere in this path. It is a different, separate route from anything Arbyn decides to do on its own while working a conversation.

The order number is pre-filled when the conversation already has a linked order, and editable when it doesn't. Every order-scoped action lets you type the order number in if Arbyn hasn't linked one automatically.

A repeat click is protected against, not just a fresh one. Each action derives a stable key from what you're actually doing (which conversation, which action, and its specific details), so clicking the same button again within a short window is recognized as the same request rather than run a second time. For the two actions Shopify itself has no built-in protection against duplicates on (Issue discount and Issue gift card), Arbyn additionally reserves the slot on its own side before calling Shopify, so a double-click can't mint two codes or two cards.

Refund and Reship carry one more check: a live risk read from Shopify, right before either one runs. If Shopify has flagged the order as high risk, hasn't finished assessing a brand-new order yet, or the risk check itself fails to come back, Arbyn refuses to run the action rather than proceed blind. You'll see why in the error, and the fix is to review the order in Shopify directly. There's no override for this inside Arbyn today; if the order genuinely checks out, complete the action from Shopify's own admin instead. The other eight actions (Cancel, Edit address, Issue discount, Issue gift card, Deactivate gift card, Create bundle, Send upsell, Issue store credit) don't carry this check.

Issue store credit has its own separate eligibility check instead. The button is disabled with a tooltip naming the exact reason whenever your store can't currently use store credit at all (classic customer accounts, or accounts turned off in Shopify), so you never open the form on a store where it can't work. See the store credit article for exactly what determines eligibility.

Every action drops a matching record into the conversation once it succeeds: a line in the thread describing what happened, and a timeline event capturing who did it and when (visible via Show events, under Guardrails & Escalation). On the chat widget, the customer sees their side of that update appear in the conversation live. Deactivate gift card is the one exception. Since it's an internal correction rather than something to announce, it only writes the timeline record for you, with nothing posted for the customer to see.

On an email conversation, that same record does not currently reach the customer's inbox. The line in the thread and the timeline event are for you, not for them. Refund and Cancel are the two exceptions, and only because Shopify sends its own separate notification for those two (see below); every other action, including Issue discount and Issue gift card, currently has no automatic way of telling an email customer what you just did. Until that's addressed, tell the customer yourself, in the same email thread, whenever you run one of these on an email conversation, especially a discount code or gift card code, since that's the only way they'll ever see the code.

Does the customer know an action happened without me saying anything? On chat, yes: every action posts an update that reaches the customer's widget live. On email, no, not on its own: the record you see is for your own thread, and only Refund and Cancel currently reach the customer at all, through Shopify's own notification email rather than anything from Arbyn. For every other action on an email conversation, write to the customer yourself if you want them to know. Deactivating a gift card is the one action that's meant to stay entirely internal, on every channel.

Why did my Refund or Reship get refused with a risk message? Shopify has flagged, hasn't yet assessed, or couldn't be checked for that order's risk right at the moment you clicked. Review the order in Shopify's own risk analysis first; there's currently no way to force the action through from inside Arbyn.

Can I run a Quick action without a linked order? Yes for the order-scoped actions. Type the order number into the field the modal asks for, and Arbyn resolves it server-side before running the action.

What's the difference between Quick actions here and the agent doing something on its own? Quick actions is entirely merchant-driven: you open the modal, you decide, you submit. Anything Arbyn does on its own runs through its normal reasoning and guardrails, and a genuinely sensitive change (like a validated address edit) shows up as its own approval card instead. See the right-hand panel article for how that one works.