The Merch.com Inbox extension lives in your Chrome side panel inside Gmail. Open any thread, click the Merch icon, and the recipient is already filled in from the people you are emailing. You can send a campaign invite, a one-off gift link, or a re-send of something you have sent that contact before, all without switching tabs.
It is the fastest way to put a gift in front of someone you are already talking to.
#What you can do with it
- Send a campaign invite to the person in the active Gmail thread. Pick a campaign, confirm, done.
- Send a one-off gift link when you do not need a full campaign behind it.
- Re-send what you have sent before. The panel surfaces the recipient's past sends so a follow-up gift is two clicks.
- See your spending caps in context. Budgets, per-recipient limits, and credit headroom show up in the panel before you send, so you never trigger a hold by surprise.
#Installing it
The extension is available for any teammate on your account. Two ways in:
- Chrome Web Store. Search for "Merch.com Inbox" and click Add to Chrome. The icon lands in your toolbar.
- Early access via your account team. If your team is on the early roster, your account rep will send a sideload link with install instructions.
Once installed, pin the icon to your toolbar so it is always one click away. Then open any Gmail tab and click the icon to launch the side panel.
#Signing in
Three paths, tried in order:
- Auto-detect. If you are already signed into merch.com in the same browser, the extension picks up your session automatically. Nothing to do.
- Stay signed in. Once you have signed in through the extension, your session is remembered until you sign out or the token expires.
- Sign in inside the panel. First time on a new browser, type your normal email and password. Same credentials as the portal.
If you are part of multiple accounts on Merch, the extension uses whichever account is active in the portal. Switch accounts in the portal and the extension follows.
#Sending merch from a thread
- Open the Gmail thread with the person you want to send to.
- Click the Merch.com Inbox icon in your Chrome toolbar.
- The side panel opens with the recipient pre-filled from the thread.
- Pick a campaign from your account, or choose the gift-link option for a one-off send.
- Review the budget and limits surfaced in the panel.
- Click Send.
The recipient gets the same invite or link they would get if you had sent it from the portal, including your account's branding, language, and redemption settings.
#Spend controls and limits still apply
The extension is a sending surface, not an escape hatch. It calls the same API the portal uses, so every guardrail you have set up applies:
- Campaign budgets that have hit their cap will block the send and tell you why.
- Per-recipient limits will block a re-send if the recipient is already at their cap.
- Team and user spending caps apply to the teammate doing the sending.
- Account fulfillment credit limit governs all of the above.
If a send would breach any of these, you see the same message you would see in the portal, and you can resolve it (raise a cap, swap to a different campaign, or request a higher limit) before retrying.
For background on these guardrails, see Setting up spend controls and Campaign budget and link limits.
#Privacy
The extension only reads what it needs:
- Thread participants. So it can fill in the recipient. Names and email addresses, not message bodies.
- Your active Gmail tab. So the icon can act on the right conversation.
It does not read message content, attachments, unrelated tabs, or anything else. Everything is processed locally in the browser. The only network call out of the extension is the GraphQL request that creates the campaign send, exactly the same call the portal makes.
#Troubleshooting
The recipient field is empty. The extension reads the thread's participants from the page. If Gmail is still loading or the thread has not finished rendering, give it a second and click the icon again.
Send button is disabled. A limit or hold is blocking the send. Hover the disabled button to see which cap is at issue. The most common ones are an empty campaign budget, an exhausted per-recipient cap, or the account being at its credit limit.
I see a sign-in screen even though I am logged into the portal. Confirm you are signed in on the same browser profile. The extension reads your session cookie from your merch.com domain, so a different Chrome profile or an incognito window will not share state.
I want to stop using the extension. Right-click the toolbar icon and choose Remove from Chrome. Your account and history are untouched. You can reinstall any time.
#Related
- Sending invites covers the same send action as it works inside the portal.
- Campaign budget and link limits explains the caps the extension respects.
- Setting up spend controls walks through the broader guardrail system.
- API keys and integrations lists other ways to send through Merch from external systems.