Help · Audience
Conversations
When somebody texts your store's number, it lands in Audience → Conversations. Each person is one row, newest first. A name in bold with a number beside it marks texts nobody on your team has opened yet. Open a row to read the whole conversation: what they texted you, and every text you sent them — campaigns, automations and your own replies — in the order it happened.
If your store has no text number yet, nobody can text you, and the screen says so. Setting one up is on the Settings tab, under Text messages.
Replying
Type in the box under the conversation and press Send reply. Your store's name goes in front of your words, so they know who it is from — the screen shows you the exact name before you send.
A reply can go only while the conversation is open: within a day of their last text to you, from the number on their profile. That is the rule for texting somebody who has not agreed to marketing texts — they wrote to you, so you may answer. After a day, the box is replaced by a sentence saying so, and the next text they send opens it again. A reply goes only to a US number.
If a reply does not go, the screen tells you why, in words. When the reply was refused, it stays in the conversation marked Not sent so you can see what you wrote. When it could not go yet — late at night where they are, for example — nothing is recorded: your words stay in the box, and the screen says when to try again.
Owners, managers and marketers can reply. A reply sends a text, and a viewer can read every conversation but cannot send one. Our support staff can open a conversation to help you and can never reply to one.
A reply also needs a profile whose identity is confirmed; the box says so when it is not. Pausing a profile does not stop a reply — a pause holds your marketing, not your answers.
Texts from a number no profile has
A text from a number none of your profiles carries still shows up, under the number itself. You can read it, but there is no one to reply to — replying needs a profile. Once a profile with that number exists, new texts from it land in that person's conversation.
Images and attachments
An image somebody texts you is kept, for as long as their profile is, and shown in the conversation — so are short videos and voice notes. It is never public: the link your screen uses to show it lasts ten minutes and is made fresh each time you open the conversation, and every time somebody on your team views one, we record who and when.
An attachment too large to keep, or of a kind we do not keep, is not shown; the conversation says one arrived.
STOP, and the reply that follows it
Somebody who texts STOP gets no more texts from you — not a campaign, not an automation, and not a reply — until they text START. The conversation marks the text that did it. Words like CANCEL, END, QUIT and UNSUBSCRIBE count the same as STOP. It is the phone number that said STOP, so it holds for whichever profile carries that number — including one that got the number afterwards. What decides is the number's most recent word, in the order the person sent them: a START sent after the STOP opens replies again, and a START sent before it does not, however late it reaches us.
When two of your profiles share one number, a START brings back the oldest of them. You can reply on that profile. If one of the others was unsubscribed after that START — by you, or by any other route — no reply goes to the number at all.
When somebody texts exactly STOP, their phone carrier answers them straight away, automatically, from your number. That reply is not from you, and it is not from us. Nobody can change its wording. They see:
NETWORK MSG: You replied with the word "stop" which blocks all texts sent from this number. Text back "unstop" or "start" to receive messages again.
The conversation shows that text, word for word, under their STOP, so you recognize it if somebody forwards it to you and asks who sent it. It names no store because the carrier writes it, not you.
When a stop word arrives inside a longer message, or in a spelling the carrier does not recognize, the carrier does not answer — so your number sends them one short confirmation instead, and it shows in the conversation as an automatic reply to their STOP.
A message that reads like somebody asking you to stop but matches none of the stop words is marked for you to read. Nothing changes on its own; you decide what it means.
Unread
A text counts as read the moment somebody on your team opens the conversation and the text is on the screen. The Audience card for Conversations shows how many texts are still unread across the store.