ShopGuide and PathGuide: two apps, one store
ShopGuide and PathGuide are two separate apps for the same store. They do different jobs, and they work together.
- ShopGuide is the agent on the storefront. It greets shoppers on the page they are on, answers from your live catalog, recommends what fits, adds to cart in the chat, helps with orders, and hands off to your team when a person is needed.
- PathGuide is the data layer on top of ShopGuide. It reads what happened on the store and turns it into journeys, segments, and merchandising insight.
- Path Explorer lives inside PathGuide, and only there. It is not part of ShopGuide. Journey maps, heatmaps, segments, bot traffic, checkout journeys, and the Path Guide assistant all live in PathGuide.
How PathGuide connects to ShopGuide
PathGuide reads two things from ShopGuide, and nothing else is merged between the two apps.
- Order note attributes stamped by ShopGuide onto Shopify orders. When ShopGuide assists an order, it stamps the order with the session, visitor, and chat thread ids (
SG_SessionID,SG_VisitorID,SG_ThreadID). PathGuide reads those from Shopify order webhooks and links each order back to the visit and the chat thread. That is how chat-assisted attribution, Chat Impact, and checkout journey events work. - Shared order rows. Both apps write order rows by Shopify order id, and a shop with both apps installed gets one row per order, not two. Chat attribution, NPS, A/B tests, customer enrichment, and data model v2 stay in ShopGuide. They are not PathGuide data.
PathGuide also collects its own tracking directly: page views, navigation, and clicks through its own tracker, plus Shopify order and customer data through its own webhooks and Admin API. ShopGuide does not depend on PathGuide to run the chat. The chat works with or without PathGuide installed.
Where to go for each task
| Task | Go to |
|---|---|
| Chat with shoppers, appearance, Settings, knowledge base, NPS, A/B tests, transcripts, Claude MCP | ShopGuide admin |
| Path Explorer and its tabs, Journey Heat Map and page-click map, segments, Tag in Shopify, Sync to Klaviyo, bot traffic, CSV exports, Path Guide assistant | PathGuide admin |
| Theme blocks and app embeds | Shopify admin and theme editor |
| Lists, flows, campaigns, SMS | Klaviyo |
What PathGuide does not do
PathGuide does not run the storefront chat, does not send email or SMS, and does not run NPS surveys or A/B tests. Those stay in ShopGuide. PathGuide adds people to Klaviyo lists and fires events; your Klaviyo flows do the sending.