AI shopping assistant

An AI shopping assistant is an AI agent embedded in an online store that helps shoppers find products, answers questions about them, checks orders and, where the platform allows it, manages the cart. It is the e-commerce form of AI customer support: the same grounding and escalation model, plus live access to the store's catalog and order data.

What a shopping assistant can do

• Product search and recommendation. Search the catalog by name, price range or stock status and return direct product links.
• Order lookup and tracking. Find an order and report its fulfillment and shipping status.
• Cart help. Read the shopper's cart and add items, then hand over a checkout link.
• Policy questions. Answer returns, shipping and payment questions from the store's own pages and documents.
• Escalation. Pass a complaint or a refund request to a human with the conversation attached.

What it needs from the store platform

Live data. A shopping assistant that only knows what was pasted into a document goes stale as soon as a price changes. The useful integrations connect to the platform's API (Shopify's GraphQL Admin API, the WooCommerce REST and Store APIs) and keep the catalog in sync through webhooks.

Shopping assistant vs chat widget

A generic chat widget on a store page can answer policy questions from a knowledge base. A shopping assistant can also act on the shopper's own data, which is what resolves "where is my order" and "do you have this in medium" without a human.

In SolveoAI

SolveoAI ships a shopping assistant for Shopify and WooCommerce: product search, order lookup, cart and checkout links, and customer profile updates, with the catalog kept current by webhooks and scheduled sync. Both are available on Pro and above; merchants who install from the Shopify App Store are billed through Shopify. See the e-commerce solution.