Telegram Storefront (In-bot Mini App)

Turn your Telegram bot into a full in-app storefront. Build a polished, multipage product catalog — with photos, videos, themed pages, an AI assistant per product, and lightweight order-taking — that opens inside Telegram the moment a customer taps your bot’s menu button. No app store, no separate website, no checkout to manage. Just a tap, and your customer is browsing.

Free on every plan, including the trial. Built in a visual drag-and-drop composer at Integrations → Telegram bot → Configure mini app: 12 block types, 6 themes, per-product AI chat, order CTAs that hand off to a real human in your inbox.

What you can build

A few common shapes the storefront takes in production:

• Boutique storefront — hero banner + product grid + per-product chat (“Does this come in size M?”) + order inquiry form. Orders land in your inbox; a teammate replies from there.
• Restaurant menu — multipage (Starters / Mains / Drinks) + photo gallery + Cart Review block + delivery address field on checkout.
• Course or service catalog — product cards for each course with a Video block intro, testimonials, and a “Book a call” CTA back to the bot.
• Brochure site — hero + about page + gallery + contact card + FAQ — no products at all. The storefront becomes a polished mobile brochure that lives inside your bot.
• Lead-capture landing — one page, one hero, one form, one CTA. The lightest possible “Telegram funnel.”

Start with one page, grow into a multipage catalog when you’re ready.

Why it matters

• Customers never leave Telegram. No app install, no domain to remember, no checkout flow to abandon. The storefront opens in Telegram’s WebView and inherits the user’s theme, language, and login.
• One tap from a chat. The menu button next to the composer auto-wires to your storefront when you connect the bot. The label auto-flips to “Shop” the moment you publish a product — no BotFather config needed.
• AI-native product chat. Per-product chat is scoped to documents you attach to that product — the assistant can answer “what’s the return policy on this dress?” with confidence, without leaking facts from other products.
• Order handoffs to a real human. Lightweight order forms (inquiry or cart mode) land in your Inbox as a structured handoff, with the customer’s Telegram DM held open for follow-up.
• Free on every plan. Trial gets a 5-page / 25-blocks-per-page / 100-product-docs cap; every paid plan removes the caps. Pricing is per-org — adding a second Telegram bot doesn’t change your tier price.

At a glance

• Multipage, drag-and-drop. End users tap the hamburger (top-left) to switch pages. If you publish one page, it loads full-screen.
• 12 block types — Hero, Product card, Product grid, Carousel, Gallery, FAQ, Testimonial, CTA back-to-bot, Contact, Video, Rich text, Cart review.
• 6 themes (Telegram default + 5 custom) with per-block style overrides.
• Draft → Publish lifecycle with one-click revert to the last published snapshot.
• Per-integration on/off toggle — flip it off and the bot menu reverts to Telegram’s / command picker; the public URL returns 410 Gone so stale bookmarks don’t leak content.
• Locale-aware shell (English, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, French, Russian) — auto-follows the end user’s Telegram language, or pin a single locale.
• Built-in Help Center — a pinned FAQ surface for ad-hoc questions, always one tap away. See below.
• No payments, no inventory, no shipping — this is a polished catalog + lead-capture surface, not a full e-commerce stack. Pair it with a human in your inbox and you have a complete sales loop.

How customers find it

When someone opens your Telegram bot, they see the menu button next to the composer. Tapping it opens your storefront full-screen inside Telegram. The button label is:

• “Shop” — auto-set if your published storefront contains any product card or product grid
• “Open” — auto-set otherwise
• Whatever you typed — if you set a custom label in the composer (any 1–32-character string survives every publish until you clear it)

The storefront URL has the shape https://storefront.cuneiform.chat/{your-org-slug} (with ?i={integration_id} appended only if your org has more than one Telegram bot). Copy this URL from the integration card for QR codes, ads, or to register a BotFather t.me/<bot>/<app> direct-launch link (see the BotFather playbook on the bot card).

Prerequisites

• A connected Telegram integration. The storefront rides on top of it — there’s no separate integration to add.
• (Optional) Product images, product copy, FAQ entries, and knowledge-base documents to wire into per-product chat.

Quick start (5 minutes)

The shortest path from “I connected a bot” to “my first customer is browsing”:

1. Go to Integrations → your Telegram bot → Configure mini app. The composer opens in Draft state.
2. Click ”+ Add page” in the left rail. Name it (e.g. “Home”).
3. Add a Hero block — headline, subheadline, a 16:9 background image (drop a photo, the cropper opens automatically).
4. Add a Product card — name, price, 1:1 image, short description. Toggle on AI chat and attach a doc (a PDF spec sheet, your shipping policy — anything from your KB).
5. Add an Order CTA on that product — pick inquiry mode, choose form fields (name is always required).
6. Click Publish. The bot menu button auto-relabels to “Shop” since you have a product.
7. Open your bot in Telegram. Tap “Shop.” Tap your product. Tap “Ask a question.” Tap “Order this.” Submit. You’ll see the handoff land in your Inbox within seconds.

That’s the minimum-viable storefront. Add more pages, more products, themes, videos, and a Help Center as you grow.

The composer

The composer lives at Integrations → [your Telegram bot] → Configure mini app (also reachable via the three-dot menu on the bot card). It’s a 3-pane layout:

A sticky toolbar at the top has: a status badge (Draft / Published), a ⋯ menu (Discard changes / Revert to published), Save as draft, and Publish.

Draft vs Published

• Save as draft — your edits are saved but customers still see the last published version.
• Publish — your draft becomes live; a frozen “published snapshot” is automatically saved so you can roll back later.
• Discard changes — throws away unsaved local edits and reloads the last-saved version (no server call).
• Revert to published — copies the published snapshot back into your working draft and republishes it. Disabled for orgs that have never published before.

If you click Save as draft while currently Published, you’ll get an “unpublish” confirmation dialog (with a hint about how to get back).

The 12 block types

Drop any of these onto a storefront page:

Every block also supports per-block style overrides — background color, text color, font size — multiplied with the page theme. Use them sparingly; the theme handles the look by default.

Themes

Pick a theme per page. The theme controls background, text color, accent color, and font.

Where you don’t pick a theme, you get the Telegram default — your storefront always feels native to the customer’s Telegram app.

Per-integration controls

Each Telegram integration has independent settings, scoped to that one bot. Adding a second Telegram bot to the same org gets its own independent toggles. All three live in the composer’s left rail under Mini app settings.

Storefront on/off toggle

• Default: on.
• Turning it off does two things at once:
  1. The bot’s menu button is reset to Telegram’s default / command picker — the storefront is no longer reachable from the bot UI.
  2. If a customer still has the storefront URL bookmarked and opens it directly, the shell shows a “currently unavailable” message (the server returns 410 Gone so stale caches can’t leak content past the off-switch).
• The toggle confirms once with a dialog before disabling.
• Turning it back on restores the bot menu button (auto-label or your override, whichever is set).

Menu-button label override

• Default: auto-derive on every publish — “Shop” if your storefront has any product block, otherwise “Open”.
• Set a custom label (1–32 chars) to freeze the button text — auto-derive is skipped from that point on, even after content changes or republish.
• Clear the field (empty string) to return to auto-derive.
• Use a custom label if your audience doesn’t speak English — the default auto-label is English-only.

Storefront UI language

The shell uses the customer’s own Telegram language for its chrome by default. If you’ve authored your storefront in only one language, you can pin the shell’s chrome language: pick en, es, pt (Brazilian), fr, or ru. Leaving it blank keeps the auto-detect behavior.

This only affects the shell chrome (drawer, system buttons, Help Center heading) — anything you typed in a hero headline, product name, or rich-text block is rendered as-is.

Per-product AI chat

Any product card can become a chattable product. Each product card carries a two-button row in the composer for managing the documents that power its chat:

• Attach docs — opens a picker that lets you pick from any folder in your knowledge base. Docs already attached to this product are shown disabled so you can’t double-attach. Need a new file? Use the inline Upload new action in the picker — it lands in your KB and is auto-selected.
• Linked docs (N) — opens a manager that lists everything currently attached. From there you can unlink a doc from this product (the doc stays in your KB and on any other products it’s linked to) or jump into the Knowledge Base view to edit it. The manager also shows a “Also linked to: …” strip when the same doc powers other products.

When a customer taps the product, an in-sheet chat opens. The chat is scoped to that single product’s linked documents only — the assistant won’t leak answers from other products’ files. Conversations are streamed live (SSE) and stored in a dedicated collection per integration.

A few things worth knowing:

• One doc can power multiple products. Share a single “Shipping & returns” PDF across every product instead of uploading it five times.
• Unlinking is per-product. Removing a doc from one product card leaves it intact in your KB and on any other products that link to it. To delete a doc everywhere, delete it from the Knowledge page — all product links for it are cleaned up automatically.
• Docs land in a “Showcase Products” folder by default when you use the inline upload from the picker, but you’re free to organize them anywhere in your KB.

Tier limits apply to the total number of product docs you can attach (see Tier limits).

Order inquiries & cart (optional)

You can attach an Order CTA to any product card or product grid. This is purely a structured-message handoff — no payments, no inventory, no fulfillment.

Two modes

• inquiry mode — customer taps “Order this” → a form opens with the product pre-filled → they submit → one handoff lands in your inbox.
• cart mode — customer taps “Add to cart” → product is added to a local cart (lives in their browser only, keyed to your integration) → they review on the cart page (a Cart review block) and check out → one multi-line handoff lands in your inbox.

Form fields

Choose any subset of name, phone, email, notes, delivery_address. name is always required regardless of what you select.

What happens after submit

1. A new conversation is created in your inbox with the formatted order summary as the first message.
2. A handoff is created — a human team member is signaled to take over. Line items and contact info are attached as structured metadata.
3. The system instantly sends a localized “Got your order” message back to the customer’s Telegram DM, which keeps Telegram’s 24-hour reply window open so your team’s replies from the inbox route cleanly back to the customer.
4. The inbox detail view renders a dedicated Order Request Panel with line items, prices, contact info, and notes laid out cleanly.

Anti-spam / anti-duplicate

• Each customer can submit at most 10 orders per minute; each tenant at most 100 per minute.
• Double-taps within 60 seconds on the same exact order are dedup’d; two different orders within 60 seconds go through.

Built-in Help Center

Every storefront ships with a small Help Center — a pinned support page at the end of the page menu, always one tap away for customers who need an FAQ or want to ask the bot a question. Authored from a dedicated panel (Integrations → bot card → Help Center), it carries up to ~50 entries with drag-to-reorder. Two entry modes: curated (markdown answer renders inline, zero LLM cost) and agent (tapping fires a pre-written question into the bot chat). You can also surface a subset of these entries inline on a storefront page via the FAQ block — useful for putting a few key answers next to product cards.

Most customers never need to open it — products, gallery, and order CTAs answer the buying-flow questions on the storefront itself.

Images

When you upload an image in the composer:

• Allowed formats: PNG, JPEG, WebP.
• Max upload size: 2 MB (the original — what gets stored and served is much smaller).
• Inline cropper opens automatically, locked to the right aspect ratio for the slot (16:9 for hero backgrounds, 1:1 for product / gallery / testimonial avatars).
• Auto-compression: cropper output is compressed to WebP in your browser before upload (hero ≤500 KB, product/gallery ≤350 KB, avatar ≤100 KB).
• Recommended dimensions helper text is shown above each empty dropzone.
• Image URLs auto-refresh every 15 minutes via secure presigned URLs — customers never see your raw storage paths.

The 2 MB cap is on the original you upload, not on what customers see. Drop in a 12 MP phone photo or a print-resolution catalog shot as-is — the in-browser cropper handles the scale-down without visible quality loss.

Tier limits

Available on every plan, including the free trial. The composer enforces caps.

Notes:

• A product grid or carousel counts as 1 block toward the per-page block limit, no matter how many items or slides it contains.
• When you hit a limit, the composer surfaces an upgrade modal.
• Pricing is per-org, not per-bot. Adding a second (or fifth) Telegram bot to your org does not change your tier price. Each bot gets its own storefront inside the same plan; the caps are shared across all your bots under one org.

Permissions

The composer’s write actions (save, publish, image upload, product doc upload, revert) all require the Integration manage permission for Telegram. In practice that means Owner and Admin roles can author the storefront; Member role is view-only.

There is no “storefront-only” role today — both Owner and Admin also see Billing. If you bring on a contractor to build out your storefront, your options are:

• Add them as Admin (with the caveat that they’ll also see Billing).
• Use a screen-sharing session where you stay logged in and the freelancer drives.
• Have them prepare assets/copy offline (a doc with all the text + images) and you paste them in as Owner.

A granular “Integration Editor” role is on the roadmap.

Performance & freshness

• Server-side cache — the public storefront response is cached for 5 minutes per integration.
• Cache busts on publish — the moment you click Publish (or Revert), the cache is wiped, so customers see your changes within their next page request.
• ETag support — the shell uses HTTP If-None-Match and gets a fast 304 Not Modified if nothing changed, keeping mobile data usage low.
• Image URLs are valid for 15 minutes; the shell re-fetches automatically before they expire.

What it does NOT do

• No payments. Order CTAs are inquiry handoffs, not Stripe / WhatsApp Pay / Telegram Stars checkouts.
• No inventory tracking. Availability badges are free-text labels you edit manually.
• No shipping calculations / address validation. The delivery address is collected as free-form text.
• No customer accounts. Customers are identified by their Telegram user ID; there is no login or signup flow.
• No forms beyond Order Inquiry / Cart Checkout. The contact block is static display; the rich-text block doesn’t render forms.
• Help Center “ask the bot” and order paths refuse group / channel launches with a polite error.

End-to-end customer flow

1. Customer opens your bot in Telegram and taps the menu button — labeled “Shop” (auto-derived from product blocks) or whatever you set as a custom label.
2. The storefront loads inside Telegram. They see your first page.
3. They swipe through your gallery, watch your video, tap a product.
4. The product opens in a sheet. They tap “Ask a question” → an AI chat opens scoped to that product’s documents. They get an answer.
5. They tap “Order this” → a form pops up → they fill in name + phone → submit.
6. They instantly get a “Got your order, we’ll reach out” message back in their Telegram DM.
7. Your team gets a new handoff in Inbox with the order details. Any reply your team sends from the inbox lands in the customer’s DM in real time.

Troubleshooting

Menu button doesn’t open the storefront

1. Confirm the storefront on/off toggle is on (composer → left rail → Mini app settings).
2. Disconnect and reconnect the Telegram integration — the chat-menu button is set during the connection step, and a stale bot may be missing it.
3. If you set a custom menu button via BotFather, that overrides the platform’s auto-config — clear it via BotFather’s /setmenubutton.

Customers see “currently unavailable” when opening the URL directly

The storefront on/off toggle is off — turn it back on from the composer’s left rail.

Edits I just saved don’t show up for customers

Your edits are still in Draft. Click Publish in the composer toolbar — the server cache busts immediately. If you’ve already published and customers still see stale content, ask them to pull-to-refresh inside the storefront (Telegram caches the WebView).

Product chat answers from a different product’s docs

Double-check the Linked docs manager on the product card — only docs explicitly linked there power the chat. If a doc isn’t appearing, attach it via the Attach docs picker.

Custom menu label didn’t take effect

The label input has its own Save / Reset buttons (unlike the on/off toggle, which auto-saves). Click Save after typing — partial keystrokes never hit Telegram.

Disconnecting

The storefront is part of the Telegram integration, so it goes away when you disconnect the bot:

• Integrations → Telegram card → three-dot menu → Delete

Storefront pages, blocks, and help entries you authored are deleted with the integration. To keep the bot connected but take just the storefront offline, flip the storefront on/off toggle to off instead.

Related

• Telegram — the parent integration; the storefront rides on top of it
• Saba on Telegram — operator-facing Saba bot (different feature, also Telegram-based)
• Telegram Business — AI replies on a Premium user’s personal account (different feature)