Inline Chat: Product Discovery Inside Your Page, Not Just a Bubble

For two years the Milly Chat widget has been a floating thing: a bubble in the corner, a search bar pinned to the bottom, a slide-out panel. All of them wait off to the side until a shopper reaches for them. That works, and it isn't going anywhere. But the corner isn't the only place a product assistant belongs.

As of this release, the widget can also live inline, right inside your page. Not a launcher in the corner, but an actual section in your layout: a grid of AI-recommended products that a shopper scrolls past on a collection page, a landing page, or a product page, exactly where they're already looking.

And it isn't a static block. Ask it anything and the grid turns into a full conversation in place. Browsing and chat become the same surface.

The bubble waits to be clicked

A floating widget is opt-in by design, and that's usually the right call: it stays out of the way until someone wants it. The tradeoff is that it waits. A shopper has to notice it, decide they have a question, and click. Plenty of people who would happily look at five or six AI-picked products never do, because nothing on the page invited them to.

Inline removes that step. The recommendations are already on the page, in the flow of what the shopper came to see, so discovery starts the moment the section scrolls into view — no button to find first.

What inline looks like

You place the widget inside a container in your theme and it renders right there: a clean grid of product cards (or a vertical list, your choice), styled to sit inside your page instead of hovering over it. No corner bubble, no overlay, just a section of recommended products where you put it.

It also sizes itself to its surroundings. Drop it into a wide full-bleed section and it lays out as a four-column grid; put it in a narrow column or a sidebar and it falls back to two. You don't pick a column count or set a breakpoint — the grid reads the space it's given and adapts.

It becomes a conversation

Here's the part that makes it more than a recommendation block. The inline widget has the same assistant behind it as the floating one. The moment a shopper types a question — say, "do you have this in black?" or "what's good for a beginner?" — the grid hands off to a full conversation in the same spot. No bounce to a corner overlay or a new screen; the section they were already looking at becomes the chat.

So the inline grid is two things at once, depending on the shopper. Scroll past it and it's a curated set of picks; engage with it and it's the full assistant.

Drop it in from the theme editor

For stores on a standard Shopify theme, this is a theme-editor block. Open the editor, add the new "Inline Chat Widget" section wherever you want it, and you're done: the same drag-and-position flow as any other block, no code and no developer.

The floating widget can keep running alongside it, so this isn't one or the other. An inline grid on your collection pages with the usual floating bubble everywhere else is a perfectly normal setup. (Headless and custom storefronts get the same thing: it mounts into any container you point it at, and re-mounts cleanly across client-side navigation. Most merchants won't need to think about that.)

When to reach for it

Inline earns its place where a shopper is already browsing and a curated set of products moves them forward: a collection page that needs a guided entry point, a campaign landing page, a "help me choose between these" slot on a product page. The floating widget is still the right default for site-wide, always-available help; inline is for the specific spots where you want discovery built into the page itself.

One honest tradeoff: inline asks you to decide where it goes, where the floating widget just shows up everywhere. That's the whole point of it — a deliberate placement in the page's flow — but it's a choice you make per page rather than a switch you flip once.

If you'd like a hand deciding where it fits on your store, reach out and we'll talk through it.