In your stack
Let the store owner show you what they mean
Send the merchant one link to their storefront. They click the element that bothers them and type a sentence, and you get the page, the element, the screen size and a screenshot. No Shopify account, no app install, and no thread about which button they meant.
No credit card. Your client doesn’t need an account.
01
The email you get today
"The button on the product page looks weird on my phone." Which button. Which product page. Which phone. You ask for a screenshot and get a photo of a laptop screen taken with a phone, at an angle, with the cursor nowhere near the problem. Two days go by and the theme still is not signed off.
The merchant is not being difficult. They do not know the word for the element, and they should not have to learn it. Writhink removes the translation step entirely: they point, and the pointing is the description. What reaches you is the page URL, the element they clicked, the viewport width their phone actually reported, and a picture of the spot.
02
The two Shopify cases worth their own row
A live storefront is a public URL like any other, and the general rule for getting a page into review — shared link, Chrome extension, or the embeddable widget — is on /website-feedback-tool. These two are Shopify's own, and both come up on nearly every build.
| The case | What to do | Why |
|---|---|---|
| A pre-launch store behind the store password | Lift the password for the length of the review, or use the Chrome extension | The proxy cannot type the password, so a review link lands on the password screen. Lifting it for an afternoon is usually the pragmatic move: the alternative asks a merchant to install a Chrome extension, and the merchant is the least technical reviewer on the project. If the store cannot be opened up, the extension works because your own browser is already past the gate. A theme preview URL is the same question in miniature — open it in a private window first, and if it renders there a review link will load it too. |
| Checkout | Do not run a review there | Theme code does not run on the checkout pages, so the widget is not there either, and the parts you can change are a short list of settings in the admin rather than markup. Pins collected on checkout become requests nobody on the project can act on. The section below has the version to say to a merchant who asks. |
The extension is Chrome only: no Firefox, Safari, or Edge build. The theme editor, a local theme served by the Shopify CLI, and anything else behind a login are the ordinary cases, covered by the general rule.
03
Running a store review
For a live or unlocked storefront this is a five-minute setup and one message to the merchant.
- Step 1
Create the project on the storefront URL
Writhink loads the store through its proxy so a pin attaches to a real element — a specific product card, one line of the announcement bar — instead of to a coordinate on a picture.
- Step 2
Send the link, and ask for the phone too
Ask them to walk the store once on desktop and once on their phone. Writhink stores the viewport size and the device type with every pin, so "this looks squashed" arrives with the width that squashed it.
- Step 3
They pin in their own words
No account, no email, no verification. They type a display name and go. Vague comments are fine — the AI step rewrites them and flags the ones that are genuinely unclear instead of inventing an answer.
- Step 4
Work the list by page and status
Four statuses: open, in progress, in review, resolved. Your replies are public to the merchant, so approval happens on the item rather than in a mail thread nobody can reconstruct later.
- Step 5
Generate the prompt, then edit the theme
The prompt groups items by page and by element, keeps the screenshot URL with each one, sets priorities, and ends by asking the AI to draft replies for anything still ambiguous. Paste it into your coding assistant with the Liquid section open.
04
Why the no-account part is the whole argument here
Merchants are the least technical reviewers you will ever have, and every extra step is where a review dies:
- They already have too many logins. One more, for a tool they will use for a week, is enough friction to stall a project.
- The people who need to sign off are often not the merchant at all — a business partner, the photographer, someone's cousin who "does marketing". You send them all the same link.
- With no account they can still comment, reply in a public thread, attach files (five per comment, up to 10 MB each), and edit or delete their own comments. Ownership is held by a token in their browser.
- A guest is asked for exactly one thing: a display name. No email, no verification link, nothing to lose in a spam folder.
- If you turn live collaboration on for the project, you see who else is in the review, their cursors, and pins as they land. That turns a screen-share walkthrough into something that leaves a record.
05
Leave the checkout alone
Checkout is not a page to run a client review on. It is Shopify's surface rather than your theme's, it behaves differently once there is a real cart and a real payment method involved, and the parts of it you can change are narrow and set in the admin rather than edited as markup. Collecting pins there produces a list of requests that nobody on the project can act on, which is worse than no list.
Review everything up to it: the home page, collection pages, product pages, cart, account pages, policy and content pages, the search results. If something about checkout genuinely has to change, that is a settings conversation in the admin, not a comment thread.
06
No Shopify app. One optional script tag.
Be clear with the merchant about what you are and are not putting on their store:
- Writhink is not in the Shopify App Store. There is no app to install, no permissions to grant, and no access to orders, customers, products, or the admin. A review link touches none of that.
- There is one optional piece of code: the embeddable widget, a single script tag. Put it in an unpublished or staging theme and the merchant can leave feedback on any page, any time, instead of only during a review window.
- The widget carries a Powered by Writhink badge.
- Theme code does not run on the checkout pages, so the widget is not there either — which is the behavior you want.
- Take the tag out before you publish the theme, or keep it only on the unpublished one. Shoppers do not need a feedback button, and a screenshot taken by a signed-in customer would contain whatever their account page was showing.
07
When Writhink is the wrong tool for a store
If the question is why shoppers abandon the cart, this is not it. Writhink records what one named person deliberately told you about a page. It does not watch anonymous sessions, does not replay them, does not measure conversion, and has no opinion about your funnel. Use your analytics for that and Writhink for the sign-off.
It is also not a project tracker. There are four statuses and public replies, which is enough to run a theme handover and not enough to run a roadmap — and there is no native integration with Jira, Linear, Trello or anything else, so items live where they were left. If the reviewer needs to be inside the theme editor changing settings themselves, the useful tool is a call, not a pin.
Before you count on it
The embeddable widget carries a “Powered by Writhink” badge. The white-label add-on that removes it is announced but not purchasable during the beta, so today the badge stays.
Writhink is in open beta: everything described here is available and free, no credit card. Paid plans are announced but not purchasable yet. The one limit that applies today is five AI prompt generations a month per organization.
FAQ
Questions people actually ask
- Does the merchant need a Shopify account or a Writhink account?
- Neither. The review link is authorized by the link itself. They open it, type a display name, and start pinning. They can comment, reply, attach files and edit their own comments without ever creating an account anywhere.
- Is there a Writhink app in the Shopify App Store?
- No. There is no app, no listing, and no native connector. Reviews run on a public storefront URL through a shared link, or through the Chrome extension for pages a proxy cannot reach. The only optional code is the embeddable widget script tag you can add to a theme.
- The store is still password-protected before launch. What do we do?
- Two options. Either lift the store password for the length of the review, which is the easy path if the content allows it, or use the Chrome extension — but note the extension is installed by the reviewer, in Chrome, which is a real ask for a non-technical merchant. For a pre-launch store we would usually lift the password for an afternoon.
- Can we review inside the theme editor?
- Review the theme's storefront rendering instead — a preview URL, or an unpublished theme you can reach — and keep the editor for making the change. The editor is admin UI behind a login and it is not the page your shopper sees, so pins collected there describe the wrong surface.
- What about a headless Shopify store?
- It is a website with a public URL, so it is the plain workflow: paste the URL and share the review link. If the build you want reviewed sits on a protected preview instead, that is the Chrome extension case, the same as any other protected deployment.
- Can Writhink see orders or customer data?
- No. There is no app, no OAuth grant and no API access to the store, so nothing in the admin is reachable. A review link fetches the storefront the way a shopper's browser would. The one thing to think about is the widget: whatever is on the screen when someone leaves a comment goes into that comment's screenshot, which is a reason to keep the script off a published theme.
Start
Send one link. Get feedback you can build from.
Your clients comment right on the page — no account, no screenshots, no voice notes. Writhink sorts the comments and writes the prompt for your AI.