Ten years ago, a shop with a real person in the chat window was telling you something. This is a big company. Everyone else had a contact form.
I remembered that this week, reading through a reference build for shop assistants. Two agents. One talks to the customer: search, compare, cart, where is my order. The other sits in the back office: stock alerts, pricing, campaign drafts, every change staged until a human approves it.
Strip the vocabulary away and it is live chat.
The difference is not the technology. It is the payroll.
Live chat never failed because shops did not want it. It failed because it needs people, in shifts, who know the catalogue. Small shops could not carry that. So the good experience stayed with the companies that could.
That barrier is what just went.
Not for free. This is still something you build once, against your own catalogue and orders, and host yourself. The work did not vanish. It moved from hiring forever to building once. For a small shop, that is a different question entirely.
Here is the part I find more interesting than the chat itself. Every conversation is a customer saying, in their own words, what they wanted, what they compared, and why they left. Shops have spent twenty years inferring that from click paths. Now it is simply said.
Not tracking data. Stated intent.
The numbers tell you a thousand people left at checkout. A transcript tells you why one of them did.
The chat is the feature. The transcript is the asset.