HelpEcho is for replying to people who contacted your store. It is not a marketing or bulk email tool.
What HelpEcho is for
Answering shoppers who wrote to you — through the support portal, the chat widget, or by email — and following up on those conversations.
That is the whole intended use. Everything below exists because a small number of stores have used it for something else, and the cost of that lands on every other merchant.
What you may not use it for
You may not use HelpEcho to:
- Send marketing, promotional or newsletter email HelpEcho is not a bulk email tool. Use a service built for campaigns.
- Message people who did not contact you Do not import purchased, scraped, or otherwise unsolicited contact lists.
- Send messages that appear to come from someone else Impersonating a delivery company, a bank, a payment provider, a government body, or any brand you do not represent.
- Request payments or credentials under false pretences Including invented fees, charges, or account-verification demands.
- Send anything unlawful Or anything that breaches Shopify’s own terms of service.
Why these rules exist
Every message sent through HelpEcho leaves sending infrastructure shared by all of our merchants.
When one store sends bulk email, the bounces and spam complaints it generates attach to that shared domain. Mail providers then treat everyone’s messages with more suspicion — so a support reply from a store that has done nothing wrong starts landing in spam.
Protecting that shared reputation is the entire point of this page. It is not about restricting what you can say to your own customers.
Sending limits
Every store has a limit on how many messages it can send per minute and per hour.
The limits sit far above normal support volume — several times higher than our busiest legitimate store has ever reached — so an ordinary merchant will never encounter them.
If your store has a genuine need for a higher limit, write to us and we will raise it. That is a normal request and we say yes to it.
What happens if these rules are broken
We monitor how much email each store sends. Where that volume looks like bulk sending rather than support, we review the messages concerned in order to investigate. This is described in the Privacy Policy.
- We pause outbound email for the store. Your account, your plan and all of your data stay intact. Only sending stops.
- We write to you, explaining what our monitoring flagged and what needs to change.
- You reply. Tell us what the messages were for, and confirm the store will be used for customer support only.
- We restore sending, usually within one business day of your reply.
Repeated or deliberate abuse. For impersonation or fraud, or where the same behaviour resumes after being restored, we may suspend the account permanently and report it to Shopify and to our email providers.
We would much rather resolve a misunderstanding than close an account. If you have received a notice from us, reply to it — that is the fastest way to get sending back.
Questions
If anything here is unclear, or you want to check whether something you are planning is allowed, ask us first. We would rather answer a question than send a notice.