The enquiries inbox

When somebody fills in the contact form on your storefront, the message is kept here and, if you want, emailed to you. Enquiries is the inbox, with a count of how many are new, read and archived.

It is on every plan.

Reading one

The list shows who it is from, the subject, the start of the message, when it arrived and its status. Opening a New enquiry marks it Read, so the New count is what is genuinely waiting for you.

Inside, you get the whole message and the sender's details, and four things to do with it:

• Reply by email opens your own email program with a reply to them already addressed. Replies are not sent from here, so your conversation stays in your inbox where you can find it later.
• Mark read and Archive move it out of the way. Archived enquiries are kept, on their own tab.
• Delete removes it permanently. Archive is what you want for tidying; delete is for something you never want to see again.

Ticking several rows in the list marks or archives all of them at once.

Turning the form on

Settings → Contact Form decides whether any of this happens.

• Enable contact form shows the form on your storefront and accepts submissions. With it off, the form is not shown.
• Email me new submissions sends you an email each time somebody writes. The email replies straight back to the sender, so you can answer without opening the dashboard.
• Notification email is where those go. Leave it blank to use your store's contact address.

What the contact page itself SHOWS, the address, the phone number, the opening hours beside the form, belongs to the page rather than to this setting, and is edited where you edit your storefront.

What stops spam

The form carries a hidden field that only an automated submission fills in, and there is a limit on how often one visitor can submit. Nothing asks a real shopper to prove they are human.

If it does not work

• Nothing arrives: check Enable contact form is on, and that your storefront actually has a contact page with the form on it.
• The message is here but you got no email: check Email me new submissions, and the notification address. The email is best effort: an enquiry is never lost because an email failed.
• You cannot find a message you know you had: look on the Archived tab, and check it was not deleted. Deleting is permanent.
• A shopper says the form would not submit: they may have hit the rate limit after repeated attempts. A minute or two apart is enough.

Email support@shoponent.com with your store name if anything here does not match what you see. We read and answer every message.