Live Chat for Small Business: The Complete Guide

Live chat lets visitors ask a question while they're still on your website, and get an answer before they leave. For a small business that's the whole point: a visitor who asks "Do you ship to Canada?" is close to buying, and a quick answer is often the difference between a sale and a closed tab.

The hard part isn't installing it. It's running it with a team of one to five people who also do everything else. This guide covers the whole thing, in order: setting it up, what to say, what happens when nobody is online, following up, and keeping your customers' data safe.

Is live chat worth it for a small business?

Live chat works best when visitors have questions before they buy: price, delivery, sizes, availability, whether your service fits their case. If your site sells something people think about before paying for it, chat catches the questions that would otherwise go unasked.

It's worth it if you can answer most chats within a few minutes during your working hours, and have a plan for the rest. It's not worth it if the chat button sits there unanswered: a visitor who writes and hears nothing thinks less of you than one who never saw a chat button.

The rest of this guide is about making sure that doesn't happen.

Step 1: Install it in five minutes

Any live chat tool works the same way: you paste a small script into your site, once, in a place every page shares. With SealReply:

1. Create a free account (the free plan has no time limit).
2. Add your website and copy the code.
3. Paste it just before </body>, verify your domain, and send yourself a test message.

Step-by-step guides: any website, WordPress, Shopify.

The widget is an async script of about 38 KB, so it doesn't block your page from showing.

Step 2: Make it fit your site

A chat window that looks out of place gets ignored. Before you tell anyone it's there:

• Look: your logo, your colour, and the side of the screen it sits on.
• Greeting: one short line that invites a question. "Hi! Questions about sizes or delivery? Ask here." works better than "Welcome to our website".
• Greetings by page: product pages, pricing pages and the cart deserve different questions. In SealReply, Page rules let you set a greeting for pages whose address contains, for example, /pricing.
• Pages without the chat: your login page or a thank-you page usually don't need it.

Need ideas for what to write? Here are 25 live chat greeting messages grouped by page.

Step 3: Decide when you're available

Small teams can't be online all day, and that's fine. What matters is that visitors know what to expect.

• Set business hours. Outside them, visitors see a message form instead of a chat that nobody will answer. SealReply shows when you're back online, for example "Back online: Mon, 09:00 AM GMT+8".
• Write an after-hours note that sets expectations: "We answer every message within one working day."
• Add an FAQ to the chat's home page. After hours, you can list it under the message form, so many visitors find the answer without waiting at all.

Step 4: Hear about every chat

Desktop notifications only work while the console is open. For a small team that's a fraction of the day, so:

• Turn on push notifications on your phone and computer. New chats arrive with the console closed. By default the lock screen shows only the site and page, not what the visitor wrote.
• Turn on the wait-time reminder. If nobody answers a visitor's first message in time (30 seconds to 30 minutes; 2 minutes by default), the chat tells the visitor and offers to email them the reply. The question is saved instead of lost.
• Answer missed chats by email. Messages left while you were away arrive in Offline messages. You reply there, and the visitor gets it by email.

Full details: How to never miss a customer when you're offline.

Step 5: Answer faster

Most small businesses get the same ten questions again and again. Two habits make answering them quick:

• Quick replies. Save your answers to the common questions once. In a chat, type / and a shortcut such as /shipping to insert one. Team quick replies are shared; your own are just for you.
• Look before you answer. The panel beside each chat shows where the visitor came from, the page they're on now, their local time and earlier conversations. "Is this in stock?" is easier to answer when you can see which product page they're looking at.

How fast is fast enough? During your hours, aim to answer the first message within a minute or two. That's also why the wait-time reminder defaults to 2 minutes: after that, visitors start to leave.

Step 6: Invite visitors at the right moment — or don't

A pop-up that interrupts every visitor does more harm than good. But a short invitation on the right page can start conversations that wouldn't happen otherwise.

In SealReply, Invitations show a short line by the chat button after a visitor has spent some seconds on a page, or scrolled far enough down it. They only appear while someone can chat, never while the visitor is already chatting, and you choose how often the same visitor may be invited.

Start with one invitation on the page where buyers hesitate most — usually pricing or a product page — and see whether it brings real questions.

Step 7: Follow up after the chat

A good conversation without a follow-up is still a lost sale. When a chat looks like a real buyer:

1. In the conversation's Follow-up card, set the lead's status, an owner, and a Next follow-up time.
2. You're reminded when it's due, and told when that customer comes back to your site.
3. When they buy, mark the lead Won and add the amount, so your reports show what chat brought in.

Every Monday, SealReply sends a short summary: how many chats came in, how many left contact details, and who still needs a follow-up. It never includes what visitors wrote.

Step 8: Bring in a teammate

When one person can't cover the hours, invite a teammate under Team → Invite. A few things keep a small team tidy:

• Decide who answers which site, or let new chats be shared out automatically under Assigning new chats.
• Use internal notes in a conversation to hand over context the visitor doesn't need to see.
• Give every lead an owner, so nobody assumes someone else is following up.

SealReply plans are priced per plan, not per seat, so adding a part-timer doesn't add a monthly charge per person.

Step 9: Look after your customers' data

Chats contain names, emails, order numbers and sometimes complaints. Your visitors trust you with them, so check how your tool handles them:

• SealReply stores chats encrypted, with a separate key for each customer. Our staff can't open your conversations on their own; any access needs a second person's approval, and you're notified.
• You can export or delete everything about one visitor when they ask.
• You can keep history for less time than your plan allows.

More on this: Is your live chat private?

Step 10: Check what's working, once a month

Open Reports once a month and look at three things:

• First response time. Is it getting slower as chats grow?
• Pages where chats start. These are the pages where visitors have questions. Improve those pages, and add a page greeting there.
• Leads by status. How many chats became qualified leads, and how many were won.

A one-page checklist

• Chat installed, domain verified, test chat sent
• Logo, colour and a greeting that invites a question
• Business hours and an after-hours note
• FAQ with your three most common questions
• Push notifications on everyone's phone
• Wait-time reminder on
• Quick replies for your ten most common questions
• A follow-up time on every chat that looks like a buyer
• Reports checked once a month

Start with the first five. You can add the rest as chats come in.