Help · Getting started

Settings

Settings has its own set of pages: Store, Built-in segments, Delete profiles, Email, Domain, Unsubscribe page, Team, Billing, Integrations, one for importing from the email tool you are leaving — that page is named after the tool — and one for your assistant. Billing is still being built, and this page will grow with it.

On a wide screen those pages sit in a list beside whichever one you have open. On mobile the list folds into a single row at the top — it reads Settings › Team when you are on Team — so the page you came to read starts where you can see it. Tap the row to open the list, pick a page, and it folds away again.

Your store connection

The app connects to your store when you install it from your Shopify admin. That connection is what brings your orders, checkouts, customer records, marketing consent and Shopify customer tags into the app — and it is why almost nothing in here has to be imported or maintained by hand.

Your order history is read when you install, not just from that day forward. Your customer records are imported first, then your past orders are added to them — all of them where Shopify has approved us to read orders older than 60 days, and the last 60 days where it has not. It happens on its own, in the background, and a store with years of orders takes a while; your reports and your engagement segments fill in as it goes. Nothing to start and nothing to wait on before you use the app.

And if you import your people later, your orders are read again. An order can only be attached to somebody the app already holds a profile for, so a purchase belonging to a person who arrives in a later import would otherwise be missing. Whenever an import of your people finishes, the app reads your order history once more and attaches what it could not attach the first time. You do not have to ask for it, and nothing is counted twice.

There are two ways in, and they lead to the same place. You open the app from your Shopify admin and it runs inside the admin — and because Shopify has already signed you in, that door asks for no password and there is nothing to remember. The app also has an address of its own, app.carpemessaging.com, with the same screens, the same data and the same store behind them; you sign in there with your email address and a password. Who may use each door, and how somebody gets a password in the first place, is under Your team below.

Each email address can sign in to one store. Your store has as many team members as you like — owner, manager, marketer, viewer — but an email address belongs to one store and only one. There is nothing to pick when you sign in, and nothing to switch between: the store you signed in to is the store you are in.

If you run two Shopify stores, each one has its own subscription and its own login, so use a different email address for each. The same is true if you work on more than one merchant's store: one address per store.

This is checked when you install, too. If the Shopify account you install from uses an email address that already belongs to another store here, the app says so and does not set the store up: this Shopify account's email already belongs to another store — each login belongs to one store, so install with a different staff account's email. Nothing is broken and nothing is half-done — install again from a Shopify staff account with a different address and it completes normally.

Built-in segments

Carpe Messaging ships four segments every store gets: three that read engagement, and one hygiene rule called Suspected bots. What each one finds is written out on the segments help page, under "The built-in segments".

This page is where you decide which of them your store runs. Each one has a switch, and the page says what it finds, whether it is on, and how many people are in it.

Turning one off

Turn a built-in off and it is hidden from your segments, from your audience pickers and from every count. Nothing is deleted. The rule, the name and the number it last measured all stay exactly where they are, and turning it back on brings the whole thing back as it was. There is no other way to remove a built-in — the row menu on the segments page does not offer Delete for one, because the name has to keep meaning what your campaigns expect it to mean.

Two things worth knowing before you turn one off.

• A campaign you have already armed is unaffected. Arming freezes who it will reach, so a segment turned off afterwards cannot change the audience of a send that is already on its way.
• A draft campaign that names the segment will not arm while it is off. Turn the segment back on, or take it out of that campaign's audience.

Adding one

Suspected bots is the one built-in your store can be missing. We hold it back when we have not found Shopify tags on at least half of your profiles, because its first rule is "no Shopify tags at all" and on a store whose tags have not reached us that would be true of nearly everybody. The page says which of those is the case, and gives you Add. If one of your own segments is already called "Suspected bots", we will not overwrite it: the page asks you to rename yours first, then add ours.

Making your own version of one

You cannot edit a built-in — its rule is fixed. What you can do is copy it: open Audience → Segments, choose Clone on the row, and the copy is an ordinary segment you can rename, re-word and add your own conditions to.

A manager or the store owner can change any of this. Everyone else sees the same states and the same reasons, and no controls.

Delete profiles

This is where the store's owner deletes everybody in a segment or a list at once — most often Suspected bots, which is first in the menu and already chosen. Press Choose…, pick the segment or the list, read the count and the warning, type its name exactly, and press Delete profiles. There is no undo.

The segment stays and reads 0; a list is emptied and keeps its name. People who are also customers in your store and have never placed an order are deleted there too; a customer who has placed an order stays in your store. One deletion runs at a time. When it is done, the row says so — how many were deleted and what happened in your store — and when we can email you, the confirmation after you press says so and the person who pressed it gets the same numbers by email.

Everybody else on the team sees the row marked Owner only. What goes, what stays, and exactly what happens in your Shopify store are on the Deleting profiles help page.

Integrations

Settings → Integrations is where outside services that connect to your store will appear. An integration is a service that connects and keeps connecting — a reviews app, a loyalty program, another tool you already use — so that what it learns about a person reaches this store while you are using both.

There is none yet. The page says so, and it is worth a look only when you want to know what is there; as we build them, each one appears on it with what it would read and what it would do with it. Nothing on that page connects anything today, and nothing is hidden behind a setting you have not found.

Two things you may be looking for are not integrations, and each has a Settings row of its own. The import from the email tool you are leaving runs once and then you disconnect — that is the next section. Your MCP AI assistant is your own tool rather than a service connected to your store, and it has a section further down.

Importing from another email tool

Settings has a page where you import your work from the email tool you are leaving. One such tool is supported today, and the page is named after it. It is not an integration — nothing keeps connecting afterwards — which is why it has a page of its own, and why most stores visit it once and never again.

The page is in four parts, top to bottom, in the order you live them: your account there (the key, which account it opens, and where you disconnect), the import (one press, and the eight steps it runs), what arrived (your people, and what we could do with them), and reports (a record of every run, kept for good). Its own help page walks all four through.

The migration imports your profiles and what that tool recorded about their consent, your profile event history and your lists. Your segments, your email templates and your automations are imported one step at a time — every segment together, then every template, then every automation.

It is a migration, not a sync. You import everything once, you can import what has changed again while you are still sending from both, and then you disconnect. Nothing you import is ever written back the other way: the connection only reads.

Only your store's owner can connect an account, start a migration, import changes, or disconnect, and only the owner can see the key's last four characters. Everyone else on your team can see that a connection exists, watch it run, and read every report it produces.

It has a page of its own, because there is more to say about it than fits here — particularly about what arrives ready to email and what arrives held.

MCP AI assistant

Settings → MCP AI assistant is where you connect your own AI assistant to this store. Once it is connected it can read the store and write drafts for you — an email, a campaign, an automation, a segment. It can never send, schedule, publish, turn a message on, cancel, delete, export your people, or change consent or a setting: it drafts, you send. An assistant has exactly the permissions of the team member who connected it and never more, so a viewer's assistant only reads. You can end any connection of your own from that page, and an owner or a manager can end anybody's. A connection also ends on its own after 30 days without being used. Connect your MCP AI assistant is the page for it.

Uninstalling the app

You uninstall in your Shopify admin, like any other app.

Access ends at once, for everybody. Every team member's access is switched off and anyone signed in is signed out. An uninstall is how you take access away, so it is not a soft stop.

Sending stops. No campaign and no other marketing email goes out from a store that has uninstalled the app, or whose connection to Shopify has stopped working. A campaign that was going out at that moment stops where it is, with nobody emailed twice. It is not canceled — an uninstall is rarely a decision about that campaign — and if you come back within a few minutes it carries on by itself.

A campaign the uninstall interrupted waits for you. Once your store has been gone longer than that, the campaign stops for good rather than resuming on its own, and coming back does not restart it. You find it under Stopped, with how many people have the email and how many are still to go, and it sends nothing until you press Resume or cancel it. Resuming picks up where it left off and nobody who already has the email gets it again. What has already left cannot be unsent, which is why the decision to send the rest is yours rather than the app's.

A campaign scheduled for while you were away does not go out late. If its send time passed by more than a few minutes while the app was uninstalled, or while your store's connection to Shopify was broken and had to be reconnected, it goes back to being a draft once the store can send again, for you to schedule again. A send you planned for Tuesday is rarely the send you want on Friday, and that is your call to make rather than the app's. A near-miss is the exception: if the send time is less than about fifteen minutes past when the app next checks — which it does every minute — the campaign still goes out, a few minutes late, because that is the send you planned rather than a stale one. It is how overdue the campaign is at that check that decides it, not how quickly you came back. A campaign you scheduled after its send time had already passed is counted from when you scheduled it rather than from the time you picked: you chose that time knowing it had gone, so a near-miss like that goes out. If it then waits weeks for your store to come back, though, it is stale like any other and returns to a draft. The app returns a campaign to a draft only when your store had no working connection during the wait — never because the app itself was slow. A send the app itself held up goes out late instead, however long the hold-up was.

Your data is kept for 30 days. Nothing is deleted when you uninstall. For 30 days from the day you uninstall, everything stays where it is: your profiles and what they did, your consent records, your segments and lists, your forms, your templates and your Library, your images, and the record of what you sent.

Install the app again inside those 30 days and it is all there. Coming back calls the deletion off — there is nothing to restore, because nothing was deleted. If you leave again later, a fresh 30 days start from that day.

After 30 days it is permanently deleted and cannot be brought back. Your team members' logins go with it, and installing again after that starts you from nothing.

Two things outlive the erasure, and both are there so that coming back cannot undo somebody else's decision: a one-way fingerprint of every address that must never be emailed again, and the record of which privacy requests were made and what was done about them. Neither can be read back as an address.

Count the days from the day you uninstalled. The 30 days run from the moment the app came off your store. To get everything back, install Carpe Messaging again from your Shopify admin, which is where an app is installed. Everything is where you left it, except anything one of your customers asked to be erased while you were away — that is never held for the window — and your store's connection to Shopify, which is destroyed at the uninstall and made again when you install.

If the deletion had already begun when you came back, some of what it had reached is gone. Coming back stops the deletion where it stands, but it cannot undo what was already done. The most visible sign is an image: your Library may show an image that will not load, and an email that uses it renders a gap where it should be. Write from an address on your team, to the privacy address on our privacy statement, and we will tell you what was reached.

If you would rather it went now, ask us. Write from an address on your team, to the privacy address on our privacy statement, and say you want your data deleted: we delete it rather than holding it for the rest of the window.

Somebody's own erasure request is never held for the window. If one of your customers asks your store to erase them, that request is carried out when it arrives — inside the 30 days or outside them. The window is about your store's own data, and it never delays one person's erasure.

The connection to the email tool you were leaving is not restored. Uninstalling revokes the key you gave us and stops an import that was running. What had already been imported is your data and keeps the 30 days like everything else; the connection itself you set up again from its page in Settings when you come back.

Your forms and the record of what people do on your storefront stop with the app. Both are parts of the app rather than edits to your theme, so they go when it does and there is nothing left in your theme to tidy up.

Reinstalling is the account owner's job. Only the person Shopify holds as your store's account owner can install the app again, and when they do, only their own access comes back with it. Everyone else stays switched off, as a list to let back in one at a time.

That last part is deliberate. If a reinstall restored everybody automatically, an uninstall would never really have taken access away — the person you removed would have it again the moment you came back. They wait on Settings → Team, under No longer on your team, to be put back one at a time.

What your email says about you

Store settings is where your store's Store name, From name and Store address live. They are what every email you send carries about you: what your store is called, the name beside your subject line in somebody's inbox, and the postal address at the foot of every marketing email. All three are yours from your first day here, whether or not you have set up a domain to send from yet.

Your store address

Every marketing email you send has to show your store's mailing address. That is the law wherever you are sending, and an email without one on file is held back rather than sent.

If your Shopify store publishes an address, it is filled in from there, so most stores never have to type it. If the box is empty, Shopify had none to give — or the store is not connected yet — and the address is yours to type. Change it here whenever the address on your email should be a different one from the address Shopify holds — a PO box, a mailing address that is not where you work, or simply a Shopify record that has gone stale:

Nothing will overwrite what you type.

And under that, in smaller type, the one thing that is true of every store:

Changing it here does not change it in Shopify.

If the address in the box is the one we filled in for you, that line is preceded by where it came from. An address you typed yourself is never described as Shopify's:

Filled in from your Shopify store.

It goes on one line in your email, so you write it on one line here. What the footer of your email shows is one comma-separated line, in both the designed version and the plain-text one, and the box matches that rather than asking you to imagine it.

Until it is filled in, your marketing email does not go out. The card says so, under the box, for as long as the box is empty:

Your store has no address yet, so sending is stopped until it is filled in.

And it cannot be emptied once it is set:

Your store address cannot be empty — every marketing email you send has to show one, so sending is stopped until it is filled in.

Store name

What your store is called. The box says what it is for:

What your store is called. It is what somebody reads on your unsubscribe page, and what a text message from you is signed with.

It is filled in from Shopify the first time an owner or a manager opens this screen, and it is yours to change if Shopify has it wrong or you would rather people saw something else.

If Shopify has no name for your store — or we could not reach it — the box holds your store's web address instead, and the line under it says so:

Your store has not been named yet, so this is the name Shopify gave its web address. Type what your store is called.

Once the store has a name that line is gone, because it would no longer be true. Changing the name here never changes it in Shopify — the card says so once, under the address.

It is not the same thing as your From name, and the two turn up in different places. Your store name is what somebody reads on your unsubscribe page, and what a text message from you is signed with. Your From name is what an inbox shows beside a subject line — and a single email can set its own.

It cannot be left empty:

Your store name cannot be empty.

It has to fit on one line:

Your store name carries a line break or a control character. Retype it as one line.

And there is a ceiling, which no real store name comes near:

Your store name can be up to 200 characters.

From name

The name beside your subject line in somebody's inbox. Often your store's name, though it does not have to be — Debra @ Mommy Makeup is a perfectly good From name, and plenty of stores do better with a person's name in front of the brand:

The name people see in their inbox, next to your subject line.

A single email can set its own. Open any email in the editor and you will find a From name beside the subject line: leave it empty and the email sends under the name here, or fill it in and that one email sends under that. A welcome email signed by a person and a sale announcement signed by the store is an ordinary thing to want.

A From name is a name, not an address. Debra @ Mommy Makeup is fine — there are spaces around the @, and it reads as a name. debra@mommymakeup.com is refused, here and in the editor, because a sender line that looks like an address is how an honest store comes to look like somebody pretending to be one. The refusal says so, and shows you both forms side by side:

That looks like an email address. A From name is a name — “Debra @ Mommy Makeup” is fine, “debra@mommymakeup.com” is not.

It also has to fit on one line. If you paste a name that carries a line break or a tab, the save is refused with a note saying so:

That From name carries a line break or a control character, which an email cannot send. Retype it as one line.

And it cannot be left empty — leave the box blank here and there is no name for an inbox to show:

A From name cannot be empty.

Quotes are fine; a name like Bob "The Builder" Ltd sends exactly as written. So are accents and other marks — Débra @ Mommy Makeup arrives exactly as you typed it.

Saving them

All three are saved together, by the one Save this app uses everywhere: type into any of the boxes and a bar appears offering Save and Discard, and leaving the page with something unsaved asks you first. An owner or a manager changes them; everybody else sees them and cannot type into them.

The store's time zone

Store settings shows your store's Time zone, and shows it read-only. The note beside it says where it comes from: set in your Shopify admin. Carpe Messaging always uses your store's time zone.

The clock belongs to your store, so the app reads it rather than offering a second setting that could disagree with the first. Change it in Shopify and the app follows.

It formats every date you see — the Last activity column and the activity feed on your profiles, when a segment was counted and last edited, and the buckets your metric charts are cut into. One clock everywhere means two adjacent screens can never name different days for the same event. Compact dates in table cells show the whole moment on hover, in the same zone.

If your store has not been connected yet, the row says so: not available yet — connect your Shopify store. Until a zone is known, dates fall back to UTC rather than guessing from whichever browser happens to be open.

Your images

How many images you are holding is not on this page. It is one line at the top of Images & media, beside the images it counts — how many, how much space they take, and the most a store can hold. It is a fact about your library rather than something you set here.

Your store logo

Store settings carries your store's logo. Choose one from your image library, replace it, or take it away again. The note under the card says where it shows up:

Shown at the top of your unsubscribe page, and it comes from Images & media.

It is a store-level fact rather than a setting belonging to one screen, which is why it lives here: anything else in the app that needs your store to look like itself will read this one image rather than asking you again.

It is the image, not a copy of it. Change that image's description in Images & media and the change reaches here too. Deleting is refused while an image is in use, and your store logo counts as a use.

An image has to be finished being prepared before it can become your logo. If you pick one the moment it lands, the card says so:

That image is still being prepared. Try it again in a moment.

An owner or a manager can change it. Everyone else sees it:

An owner or a manager can change the store logo.

Your collections and pages

Store settings shows Collections and pages and a Refresh button.

Your product blocks read a copy of your Shopify collections, and your link fields read a copy of your store pages, rather than asking your store every time an email goes out. Both copies are checked once a day, and each has its own line under the button saying when it was last checked — the oldest thing in it, so the date is true of every collection, and every page, and not just the one that changed most recently. A copy nothing has read yet says so instead of showing a date.

Why you might refresh it yourself. Shopify tells us when you edit a collection, but not when a product edit somewhere else changes which rule-based collections that product belongs to. Retag fifty products in a bulk editor and nothing announces it. Your store pages have no announcement at all — Shopify does not tell us about them, so a page you have just added or renamed is ours to find on the next check. If you have just reorganized your store and want a product block or a link to reflect it now, press Refresh.

A refresh reads your whole store, so it can take a moment. If it does not get all the way through, we say so and keep what we read — press it again to finish the rest. The two copies answer for themselves: your collections can be up to date while your pages still need another go. If a refresh is already running, we say that too rather than starting a second one.

If nothing has been copied over yet, the line says so instead of showing a date.

An owner or a manager can press it. Everyone can see when it was last checked.

Catch-all addresses

Store settings carries two switches you can actually turn. This is the first:

Accept catch-all addresses from people who browsed your store

It is on when you start. Some email domains accept mail to any name at all, so a mailbox on them cannot be checked; this decides what happens when somebody who browsed your store then signs up with one of those addresses. On, they are accepted and you can email them. Off, they wait until an order confirms them. Either way their consent is recorded and they are thanked like everybody else.

Under the switch are two numbers — how many profiles the rule has accepted, and how many of those have bounced since — to be read as a pair.

An owner or a manager can turn it on and off. A marketer and a viewer see the switch and the numbers, and cannot change them. The whole story, including what counts as browsing, is on the Forms help page under Catch-all addresses.

Being told when people are waiting

The second switch is for automations with a message set to Manual — a message that holds everyone who reaches it until someone on your team sends it:

Email the team when people start waiting at a Manual message

It is off when you start, and we chose that for you: until you turn it on, people wait at a Manual message until somebody opens the automation and sees them. On, the moment people start waiting at a Manual message that had nobody waiting, everyone on your team who can release them — marketers, managers and owners — gets one email with a link to them. It is one email per message, never one per person, and nobody is emailed about that message again until everyone waiting there has been released or skipped. Under the switch it says how many people on your team it would reach.

An owner or a manager can turn it on and off. How Manual messages work is on the Automations help page under Manual messages.

Your team

The people who work in the app are your team members. Settings → Team is where they live: who is on the team and what each of them may do, the invitations you have sent, anybody who has asked to join, and anybody whose access has ended.

The two ways in

There are two doors into the app, and they lead to the same screens, the same data and the same store.

From your Shopify admin. You open the app there and it runs inside the admin. Shopify has already signed you in, so this door asks for no password and there is nothing to remember.

From app.carpemessaging.com. There is a sign-in page at that address. You sign in with your email address and the password you chose when you accepted your invitation. This is the door for somebody who works with you and has no Shopify login of their own — an agency, a designer, a writer who never opens your admin.

The role is the same through either door. Which door somebody uses is not a setting and not a kind of team member; it is only how they reached the screen.

Each email address can sign in to one store. An email address works in one store and only one, so an invitation to an email address that already signs in somewhere else is refused:

This email address is already in use by another store. Each email address can sign in to one store, so invite a different email address.

We do not say which store: it is somebody else's. Ask the person for a second address they can use with you.

The four roles

Each team member holds one of four roles, and each role includes everything the one below it can do. Beside each role, the app says:

Even four specific sentences leave a few things unsaid, and these are the places a merchant is most likely to be surprised. A marketer's own restock powers are below, and are not in that sentence because the app's own is shorter than the list of everything it covers.

A marketer may notify a restock queue, and may hold one. Both are bounded decisions about who this restock emails, so both sit with sending. Holding only ever stops mail, and stopping mail should never be harder than starting it.

The store-wide hold is a setting, and that one is a manager's. "Hold every restock for me" is a standing rule about every future restock on every variant, which is the same kind of authority as the wave settings beside it — so it sits with your store's settings, alongside them. So does Follow the store setting in the row menu, which hands a variant back to that rule and can start its restocks emailing again on their own.

A marketer may send, pause, turn an automation on, and record what somebody told you about their consent. They go together on purpose: the person who decides what goes out is the person who decides when it starts, who it should stop going to, and who has asked to be left alone. A resume can re-open mail to thousands of people at once, and turning an automation on leaves it running unattended, so both are worth a second look before you press them — but neither is taken away from the people doing the work.

Consent is the one record here that is somebody else's answer, not your decision about them, so it is worth saying what recording it by hand does and does not do. It is on the profile, in the menu at the end of each consent row. Marking a person unsubscribed stops their marketing mail and tells your store. Marking them subscribed asks you to confirm, in one sentence, that they gave you permission — and that sentence is kept with the change. Nothing at any role puts back somebody who has bounced or reported you as spam: that state is permanent, and no role in this table can undo it. Nothing at any role signs somebody up for text messages either — only the person can do that.

What a manager adds is the store itself — its settings, its connection to Shopify, and its team — rather than anything about one person.

And nobody at Carpe Messaging can do any of it for you. We can shape what would be sent while we are looking at your store to help — we cannot send it, turn an automation on, turn a message on, pause or resume anybody, change anybody's consent, or touch your discount settings. Those presses are yours, whatever role we are looking through.

Only an owner can remove data. Removing a metric you brought here — one your own integration posts, or one that arrived on an import of another tool's history — deletes history and changes what your segments catch, so it takes the one role that also holds billing. Deleting profiles, one at a time or a segment or a list at a time, is the owner's alone for the same reason, and nobody at Carpe Messaging can do it for you.

Only an owner can send your text-message registration. It buys a number your store is billed for and signs a declaration in your business's legal name, with your EIN on it. A manager still turns text messages on and off and sets their hours, name and forwarding number; the registration itself, and the details on it, are the owner's.

Only an owner can hand out the owner role. A manager may invite and manage everybody else. The invite card tells them so, and so does the row menu:

Only an owner can invite an owner.

Only an owner can make somebody else an owner.

It is said a third time above No longer on your team, because putting a former owner back is the same grant made a different way. That section is Putting somebody back, further down this page.

A role is checked on every action, not by hiding controls — someone who may not do something cannot do it by finding another way in. Where an action is not available to you, the app usually just does not draw it, which is why a marketer sees no pause option in a segment's row menu rather than a grayed-out one.

A marketer and a viewer see who is on the team and nothing else. They see who is here and at what role. There is no invite card, no row menus, nobody asking to join, no invitations waiting and nobody who has left — those sections are not drawn for them at all, and the app does not tell them what is in a section they may not act on.

One thing worth being plain about while you read the table: sending is your store's own act, and only your store's. A marketer, a manager or your owner writes a campaign and schedules it themselves, and that is the only way an email goes out. Nobody at Carpe Messaging can make your store send. We can help you shape what would go out — that is where it stops, and it is why send is a permission the table above hands to people who work in your store. A campaign is written under Campaigns, read once more on its own review screen, and scheduled from there; the roles in the table above are what governs who may do it.

Who is on the team

Members lists everybody on the team: their name and address, their role, when they joined, and when they were last here. The person Shopify holds as your store's account owner is badged Account owner, and your own row is badged You.

If you are working alone, the table says so rather than sitting empty:

You are the only person on this team. Invite somebody below and they will get an email with a way in.

Last seen is a best estimate, and it is per store. It counts visits at both doors — signing in at the app, and opening it from your Shopify admin — so somebody who only ever works inside the admin is counted here too. Time somebody spends in another store they work in is not counted and is none of this store's business. The app has not always kept this record, and nothing from before it started counts, so somebody who has not been here since then, and somebody who has never signed in at all, both read the same:

Not recently

That is deliberate. A date the app cannot stand behind would be worse than the honest sentence.

Inviting somebody

Type the address, pick the role, and Send invitation. The person gets an email inviting them to join your store, with one link in it, and the email says what the link is worth: it works once and it expires in seven days.

The link takes them to Set up your login:

Somebody has invited you to work in their store on Carpe Messaging. Fill this in and you are in.

They type their name, their email address and a password of at least twelve characters. The address is typed rather than filled in for them, and it has to be the address you invited — the note under the box says so:

The address your invitation was sent to.

If the link has already been used, has expired, has been revoked, or the address does not match, they get one sentence for all four:

Invitations work once and last seven days. Check the address you typed, or ask whoever invited you to send a new one.

They are not told which of the four it was, on purpose. Telling them apart would turn that page into a way of asking which addresses have been invited to which store.

Somebody who already has a login does not set a password from an invitation. They are on the team all the same — an invitation is not a way into an account somebody already has. The password they typed on that page was not saved, so we email them a link to set one instead:

You are on the team. This address already has a login, so an invitation cannot set a password for it — we have emailed you a link to set one. You can also open Carpe Messaging from your Shopify admin.

If the email could not be sent, you are told, and there is something to do about it:

The invitation is made and is in the list below. We could not send the email — revoke it and invite them again in a moment.

The link is never shown to you to copy, and it cannot be shown again — that is what makes an invitation impossible to intercept. So the answer to an email that did not arrive is always to revoke that invitation and invite the same address again.

Invitations waiting lists everything sent and not yet accepted, with the day you sent it and the day it expires. Revoking one:

The link in their email stops working. You can invite the same address again whenever you like.

Changing a role, and removing somebody

Every other member's row carries a menu with Change role and Remove from team. Both say what they do before they do it. A role change:

It takes effect the next time they load a screen. Nothing they have already made changes.

A removal:

They lose access to this store right away. Everything they made stays where it is.

Their work is not theirs to take with them: the segments, templates and forms they made stay in your store.

Nobody changes their own role, and nobody removes themselves. Your own row carries no menu, so a manager who wants to leave asks somebody else:

Nobody changes their own role. Ask another owner or manager.

The account owner is Shopify's to name. That row carries no menu either:

Shopify holds this person as your store’s account owner, so their role is not ours to change.

A store needs at least one owner. When there is only one, the menu still draws Change role and Remove and refuses both, with the reason beside them:

A store needs at least one owner, and this is the only one.

Somebody asking to join

Somebody on your Shopify staff who opens the app and is not on your team is not let in. Shopify's staff list is a list of who works in your store, not a list of who should see your customers, so nobody joins your team by opening the app. What they get instead is Ask for access, and pressing it usually puts a row on your Team screen rather than letting them in. Usually, because some asks never become a row: an address Shopify has not confirmed, a second press inside the hour, and anybody who already holds a seat here. Nobody is emailed or notified either way — an ask that does become a row waits there until an owner or a manager looks, and what the person asking is told promises them no row and no answer:

There is nothing more to do here. If an owner or a manager wants you on the team, they will send you an invitation.

The ask arrives at the top of Settings → Team, where an owner or a manager sees it under Asking to join:

These people work in your Shopify store and have asked to work in here too. Nobody is in until you invite them, and you choose what they may do.

Each row carries who asked and when, a role — set to Viewer until you change it — and two buttons. Invite sends them an ordinary invitation at that role, so a granted ask comes in through the same door as one you started yourself, and the same rules apply to it. Dismiss clears the row:

Nothing is sent and they are not told anything. They can ask again later, and you can invite them yourself at any time.

An ask never reaches you from an address Shopify has not confirmed, or from one that already works in another store, because neither is an ask you could grant.

Putting somebody back

No longer on your team closes the screen. It is everybody whose access has ended, and it is where they come back from:

Their access ended, and everything they made is still here. Put somebody back and they return at the role they had.

Putting somebody back:

They get their old role back and can sign in with the same login. You can remove them again whenever you like.

A manager may put back anybody except a former owner — that one takes an owner, because it hands out the owner role — and the note above the rows says so:

Only an owner can put an owner back on the team.

This is also the list a reinstalled store comes back to. Uninstalling switches off everybody's access, and reinstalling brings back the account owner alone — everybody else is waiting here, to be let back in one at a time.

Email

Email settings holds four things: where a reply goes, the typefaces your emails are set in, the two addresses your email goes out from — whose mailbox names you can change and whose domain you cannot — and how often the same person may get a marketing email from you. Two things you might expect here are elsewhere, and for the same reason both times: they are facts about your store rather than about the way it sends. Your From name and your store address are on Store settings, above, where they are yours from your first day. Your sending domain signs your texts' links as well as your email, so it has a page of its own next door — Settings → Domain, below.

Before your domain is confirmed

Most of this page appears once your own domain is set up and the email provider has confirmed it, and until then the page says which of those two you are waiting on. Whether there is anything left for you to do depends on which of them it is, and the page says which.

What you can set while you wait depends on whether you have been here before. A store setting up for the first time sees this one sentence and nothing else: the reply address and the typefaces appear with the rest of the page, and until then your emails use the ones every store starts with. A store that uninstalled and came back keeps all of it — your reply address and your typefaces were never thrown away — so you get the whole page, and the waiting is said inside Your sending addresses, about the addresses alone:

Your sending addresses appear here once your domain is set up.

Your From name and your store address are on Store settings either way, and they are yours from your first day.

If you have not started, the page points you at the page that starts it:

Your sending settings appear here once your domain is set up.

If a setup is under way — whether the records are still waiting to be published or the provider is checking ones you published this morning — it says so instead, because that is a different thing to know, and it points you at the page where the rest of it happens:

Your domain is being set up on Settings → Domain. Your sending settings appear here once the email provider confirms it.

And if a setup stopped — it did not finish, or the records it needs never arrived — Settings → Domain holds whatever you published and the reason:

Your domain setup did not finish. Your sending settings appear here once it does.

Reply-to address

Where a reply goes when somebody answers one of your emails. It is filled in from the contact address your Shopify store publishes.

Leave it empty and replies go to an address nobody reads. The address your email is sent from is a technical one, set up for your store; nothing is watching it. This is the field that decides where a customer who hits Reply actually reaches you, so it is worth setting.

Your store's two typefaces

Your emails are set in two typefaces: a body typeface for the words, and a heading typeface for headings. Pick them once here and every new template starts in them, so your email looks like your store without you setting it on every block.

The heading typeface can follow the body one, and that is where it starts. Leave it set to "Follow the body typeface" and every heading matches the words around it, which is a real design and not a gap. Choose a different one and new headings start in it — a serif heading over a sans body, or the other way around, is the oldest pairing there is.

Each face is shown in itself. Open either menu and every typeface writes its own name in its own shapes, with your store's name under it in the same face — so you are choosing what your email will look like rather than choosing a word. Your store's name comes from the Store name on Store settings — the same name your unsubscribe page prints, so the two can never disagree. If what you read under the faces is not what you want people to see, that is the box to fix.

Anywhere you have deliberately chosen a different typeface stays as you set it. Changing either of these does not sweep through templates you have already written and overwrite choices you made on purpose. It sets what a new template begins with, and it is what any block you never touched is shown in.

In the template editor the same list appears on a text block and on a heading, with your store's own face at the top of it so you can always see which one is yours — your body face on a paragraph, your heading face on a heading.

Why the list is short. These are faces we chose because every inbox already has them. A person opening your email might be in Gmail on a laptop, in Outlook at work, or on their phone, and each of those draws the words in a face the device itself carries. Choosing from faces that are everywhere is what makes what you design and what your reader sees the same thing, in a hundred different email apps, rather than a design that quietly turns into something else on the way.

Match my theme

Match my theme reads the typefaces your online store's theme uses and shows you the closest match from the list — one for the body, one for headings.

Nothing changes until you say so. The button reads your theme and puts what it found on screen; you decide whether to use it, and then you save it like any other change on this page. Your body typeface is what every template you have already written is set in, so it never moves without you having read what it would move to.

If your theme's font is not one of ours, you are told that. A theme can use any font a web page can, and most of those are not faces an inbox has. When that happens the match names the closest of our six rather than pretending it found your exact one — so you can take it, or pick something else yourself.

Changing your typefaces does not change anything about your Shopify store or your theme.

The addresses your email comes from

Your sending addresses is the card that holds them. Two boxes — Marketing mailbox name and Order and account mailbox name — hold the part of each address before the @. They start as hello and orders on your own domain, and both are yours to change:

Change the name before the @ to anything you like — it needs no new setup and nothing has to be published. Nobody has to read either mailbox: where a reply goes is your Reply-to address, above.

Each box holds the name, not the whole address. Under them, a line each says the whole thing as you type it, so you can read what an inbox will show before you save — Marketing emails come from news@yourdomain.com.

A mailbox name is letters, numbers, dots, dashes and underscores. No spaces, no @, and dots have to sit inside the name rather than at either end or two in a row — news.letter is fine, news. and .news and ne..ws are not. Type something else and that box's line says so — about the box, not about your store, whose addresses are untouched by a name you are still typing — with the rule under both of them, in the same words the save would use:

Use letters, numbers, dots, dashes and underscores — no spaces, no dot at the start or end, and no two dots in a row.

There is a ceiling too, and it is generous enough that you are unlikely to meet it — 64 characters before the @, which is the longest any email address is allowed. A name past it is refused with its own sentence rather than the one above, so you are never told about full stops when the only thing wrong is length:

That mailbox name is too long. Use 64 characters or fewer before the @.

And an empty box says that it is empty, for the same reason.

Capital letters are not a mistake: what you type is saved in lower case, so News and news are one address, and the line under the box shows you the lower-case one because that is the one your email will come from.

The part after the @ is not a box, and that is not something waiting to be built. Your email is signed, so inbox providers can tell it is really from you rather than from somebody pretending to be you — and the signature belongs to your domain:

These are signed, so inbox providers can tell your email is really from you. The signature belongs to the domain, so the part after the @ cannot be typed over — a different domain could not be signed and would not be delivered.

Under that sentence is a See your domain button, which is where the other half is set.

A mailbox name is named by none of the records you published, which is why renaming one costs you nothing: news@yourdomain.com is signed exactly as hello@yourdomain.com was, the moment you save it.

Both boxes appear once your own domain is set up, and the card carries a button to Settings → Domain, where the other half is set.

How often the same person gets an email

This is your store's frequency limit: the shortest gap between two marketing emails to the same person, whatever sent them. It starts at 4 hours.

Your store’s frequency limit covers every marketing email it sends — campaigns and automations alike. A send that would come too soon waits until the gap has passed. A change applies to everyone at once, including people already waiting.

An owner or a manager can change it. The switch turns the limit on or off, and while it is on, Wait at least this long between marketing emails offers gaps from 1 hour to 1 week. Turning it off keeps the gap you chose, so turning it back on puts it back. It is saved with the rest of the page.

A change applies to your whole store at once, including people already waiting. Turn the limit off and nobody waits on it any more — anyone it was holding back is free to go at once. Shorten the gap and each of them goes when the new gap has passed since their last marketing email, not the old one. Lengthening the gap, or turning the limit on, moves nobody who is already waiting — it applies from their next email. A marketer and a viewer see the rule as a sentence — At most one marketing email every 4 hours — with a Manager or owner label beside it.

A single campaign, or a single send step in an automation, can be told to ignore the limit; everything else keeps to it.

If sending is paused for your store

Very rarely we pause a store's sending while we look into something, and Settings → Email says so in a line above the settings. Nothing on that page is locked while that is true — where a reply goes and both typefaces are still yours to change, as are your From name and store address on Store settings — and your domain setup is untouched. What stops is the sending itself.

Domain

Your own domain does two things here. It signs your email, so inbox providers can tell it is really from you — and it carries the links in your emails and your text messages, so the people you write to see your name rather than ours. Both are set up in one place, on Settings → Domain, and both come out of the same handful of records you publish once.

Send from your own domain

Until you set this up, your store cannot send marketing email. That is deliberate rather than a limitation: mail that is not signed by a domain you control is mail that lands in spam, and we would rather ask you for five minutes at the start than quietly deliver badly for a year.

You do it yourself, on Settings → Domain. There is no form to fill in and nobody to ask.

1. Your domain

The box is already filled in with the domain your online store sells on. Change it if your email should come from somewhere else — a store selling on shop.brand.com may well want its email to come from brand.com.

A myshopify.com address will not work, and the page says so. That domain belongs to Shopify, so nobody — not you and not us — can publish the records on it that make a signature possible. Use the domain your store sells on.

2. The two addresses your email will come from

One for marketing email and one for order and account email. They start as hello@ and orders@, and you can pick anything you like. Nobody has to read either mailbox: where a reply goes is decided by your Reply-to address, further down this page.

Then press Set up sending, once.

3. The records to publish

The page asks you to publish a handful of records at your DNS provider — usually your domain registrar, or whoever you point your domain at — so that your email is signed as yours. It reads top to bottom in the order you need it.

First: can it be done for you? Some DNS providers support Domain Connect, which lets them add all the records to your DNS settings for you. If yours does, the first thing on the step is a button that takes you to your provider. Sign in, check the list, and approve. They add exactly the records shown and nothing else. Your login never passes through us, and once it's done we can't change your DNS settings — it's a one-time approval, not an ongoing connection.

When your provider cannot do that, the step says so in one line and the records below are the way. It takes about five minutes and it works everywhere.

There are three times the button cannot appear even for a provider that supports it: while you are moving to a new domain, when two of the records on the page are still on the domain you are leaving; when one of your link names has been given an extra record to show it is yours; and when a link name is already live. The page says so in the same place, and the records are the way in every case.

Next: the names your links use. They sit above the records because renaming one changes two of the records below it — so choose the word first, then publish. There is more about them further down this page.

Then the records themselves, with a copy button on every name and every value. Check now sits on the same line as the count, and the ⋯ at the top of the card has Copy all records if you would rather take the whole set at once.

If one of your link names is already pointing somewhere, the page says so before either of those — the automatic button and the copying both. Publishing over it would take whatever is there now offline, so rename the link name here, or replace that record on purpose.

If you bought your domain through Shopify, add them there. Go to Settings → Domains, choose your domain, then DNS settings → Manage → Add custom record. Shopify's own domains cannot be set up automatically — nobody can reach them from outside — so the records on our page are the way, and they work.

Add each one as a plain record. If your DNS provider shows a proxy — often a cloud icon beside the record — switch it off for these, or your signature cannot be read. And if something is already sitting at the same name, remove it first.

You can close the page. We check every few minutes. Most domains are ready within an hour; a few take up to 72. Check now asks straight away if you would rather not wait.

Every record says where it stands. Beside each one — and beside each of your link names — is a small badge:

• Ready, with a check mark, means the record is published and your email provider has accepted it. Nothing more to do with that one.
• Found, being confirmed means we can see your record at that name and it is exactly right. Your half is done; your provider checks it next, which is the part that takes minutes to hours.
• Not found yet means nothing is published at that name. This is the one to act on.
• Points somewhere else means a record is already there and it is not ours. Publishing over it would take whatever is there now offline, so look at it before you replace it — or rename your link name here instead.
• Checking means we could not read your DNS just then. It is not the same as nothing being there, and it is never a reason to republish a record you have already added.

The heading above the records counts them as you go — 7 records · 4 published — so you can see how far you have got without reading down the list.

The records stay on the page after your domain is ready, under The records you published, each one still marked Ready and still with its copy buttons. Nothing more is being asked of you: they are there so you can compare them against your DNS provider whenever you want to — after a provider change, say, or if anything ever looks wrong with your links.

If we stop looking

If we cannot see your records after three days we stop checking, and the page says so along with what we last saw. Nothing is lost: publish the records and press Check now, and the clock starts again. Use a different domain is in the ⋯ at the top of the card, if the one you typed was not the one you meant.

And if you typed it wrong, you do not have to wait. While a first setup is still being checked the ⋯ at the top of the card offers Start over. Nothing has been sent from that domain and nothing switches off — your store is not sending from its own domain yet — so there is nothing to undo. Any records you already published can stay where they are; they do no harm. Afterwards you can set up any domain you like, including the same one.

A viewer sees the sentence instead of the button: one setup at a time is what your store may have, and while that setup stands it is the domain we are looking for.

If a setup does not finish

Very occasionally a setup stops partway — the page says so and shows no records, because none were ever made. Press Check now and we pick it up where it stopped. Start over is in the ⋯, if you would rather begin again.

4. Set up

When the records are in, the page says your email now comes from your domain, and names the two addresses and the day it happened. From that moment your store can send, and the two rows at the bottom of this page show the new addresses because they are reading the same thing.

Use a different domain starts the whole thing again for a new domain. It asks you for the new domain and the two addresses, then shows you a fresh set of records to publish. Your current one keeps sending the entire time — nothing switches until the new one is ready, the step says so before you fill anything in, and Cancel on that step leaves everything exactly as it was.

And you can change your mind after you have pressed. Once the new domain is being checked the page offers Stop this change. It puts the new setup away and leaves your current domain sending exactly as it was — nothing you have already published changes — and you can start again with a different domain whenever you like. Typing the domain you already send from is simply refused, so there is no way to press it by accident.

While you are waiting, the names your links use keep working on your current domain. They move across when the new domain is ready, and you will add one more record for each of them then. The page says so beside the names.

Who can do it

An owner or a manager. A marketer and a viewer see the same card and the same records — so they can pass them to whoever manages the domain — and cannot change anything on it.

The names your links use

Links in your emails and texts use these names on your domain, so people see you, not us. That is what customers expect when they hover, and it keeps your sending reputation yours.

Two names come with your sending domain: click.yourdomain.com for the links in your emails, and sms.yourdomain.com for the links in your text messages. Two names rather than one, because emails and text messages are judged by completely different systems: a bad day on one has nothing to do with the other, and keeping them apart is what makes that true.

The text-message name is only asked for once you turn text messages on. Until then your sending domain is six records and the text name is nowhere on the page — you may never want texts, and you may be keeping that word for something else. Turn text messages on in Settings → Text messages and the seventh record appears here, waiting like any other. If you already published it and later turned text messages off, the name stays on the page: it is yours and it is working.

Each name needs one record at your domain's settings, and it goes in with the rest of your sending records. Once we can see it, we finish the setup and the secure certificate on our side, and your links start carrying your name on the very next send. Sometimes we need one extra record to show the name is yours — if we do, it appears with the others.

A name is usually ready after your domain is, because there is a little more to do on our side. When that happens the table of sending records has gone, so the record that name is still waiting for is shown beside the name itself, with its own copy buttons.

You can rename either one. The pencil at the right of a name takes one short word — lowercase letters or numbers, no spaces, dots or hyphens. Before it happens the page tells you what it costs: your links go out on ours again until the new record is published and we can see it, and nothing is lost and no email fails while you wait. A word another store is already using is refused, and so is one your own domain almost certainly needs — www, mail, shop, api and the like, plus send, which your own sending records use.

Check now beside a name asks straight away rather than waiting for us. If we stopped looking for a name — which happens three days after we first went looking — this is how you start it again.

If you move to a different domain, the names move with you, keeping whatever word you chose. You add one more record for each of them on the new domain when you get there, and the page asks you for it then.

Nothing waits on it. Until each name is ready, links go out on ours exactly as they do today, and you lose no sends.

Two things to know about the record itself. It has to be a plain DNS record and it has to be the only thing at that name — if your DNS provider offers a proxy or a cloud icon beside the record, switch it off for this one, and if an older record is already sitting at the same name, remove it. And the word has to be one your domain is not already using: www, mail, shop and api are the usual ones we cannot take, and your own mail already lives at send.yourdomain.com.

An owner or a manager can change any of this. A marketer and a viewer see the same page and the same values, and cannot change them — a marketer may send a campaign, but the address every future campaign carries is standing authority over your mail rather than one decision.

If your store has not set up a sending domain yet, Settings → Email says so instead of showing you empty boxes — there is nothing to change there until your own domain is signing your email. This page is the thing to do first.