Setting up human handoff

Cartfilo knows what it doesn’t know. When a shopper’s request falls outside the assistant’s depth — a complaint, a policy exception, anything sensitive — it hands the conversation to your team instead of guessing. Whether that happens always, never, or only outside a schedule is set in Message mode and office hours.

Where handoffs show up

Every handoff lands in your admin’s Inbox, split into three tabs — Pending, Active, and AI — with the full conversation history attached. The shopper never has to repeat what they’ve already said.

Taking over

Open a pending conversation and select Take over to start replying. Your message reaches the shopper’s widget in real time, including if they’ve closed and reopened the tab since the handoff happened. Use saved replies to insert a common response without retyping it, and tags to categorize the conversation.

If a conversation shows as read-only with a note that it isn’t the visitor’s current session, use the Go to latest session action to jump to where the shopper is actually active.

Handing back to AI

Once you’ve resolved the shopper’s question, hand the conversation back to Cartfilo from the same screen so it resumes handling any follow-up messages automatically.

Getting notified

The moment a conversation enters the handoff queue, Cartfilo emails your store’s owner address — the same contact email on file with Shopify for your store, not a separate address you set inside the app — so you’re not relying on having the Inbox tab open. This is debounced per store so a burst of handoffs doesn’t flood your inbox with one email per conversation.

When no one’s available

If your Message mode is Office hours and a shopper messages outside your set hours, the widget shows a short contact-capture form instead of a live handoff, so your team can follow up once you’re back. See What shoppers see for what that looks like to them.