Storefront assistant: the chat bubble on your store

The storefront assistant is a chat bubble on your live store. A shopper asks *does this come in XL?* or *how long does delivery take to Pune?* and gets an answer straight away, drawn from your own products and your own policies.

It exists because most questions a small store gets are the same six questions, they arrive at 11 pm, and the shopper who does not get an answer buys somewhere else.

Turn it on

1. 1Open your store dashboard, go to the AI Co-founder tab and choose Automations.
2. 2Find the Storefront assistant card and turn the switch on. It saves at once.
3. 3Edit the Opening line if you want. This is the first thing a shopper sees when they open the bubble. It comes pre-filled with a line inviting questions about sizes, delivery and products. Keep it to 160 characters.
4. 4Open your live store in another tab and check the bubble is there. Ask it something you already know the answer to, such as the price of a product, and see what it says.

Turn it off with the same switch. The bubble disappears from your store immediately.

What it can see

The assistant is given your store's own facts and nothing else. It has no general web access and no knowledge of any other store.

• Up to 60 of your products, each with its name, price or price range, whether it is in stock, its category, its options such as size and colour, and a short piece of the description. Archived products are left out.
• Stock in plain words: in stock, only three left, sold out, or a digital download.
• Your delivery and payment settings: the shipping charge, free shipping above an amount, express delivery and its charge, whether cash on delivery is offered and any COD fee, and any minimum order.
• Your about text and every policy page you have written, including returns, shipping and terms, with a link to each.
• Your contact details and whether you have a WhatsApp number.

This is why writing your policy pages properly is the best preparation. Every question the assistant hands off is one your pages did not answer. See Policies & products page.

What it will and will not say

• It answers in one to three short sentences, and replies in Hindi or Hinglish if the shopper writes that way.
• Prices, sizes, options and stock come only from your catalogue. It is told never to invent a discount, a coupon code, a delivery date or stock it cannot see.
• It can recommend up to three products, which appear as cards with the picture, the price and a link.
• It never asks for payment details and never claims to place, change or cancel an order. It cannot do any of those things.
• When it does not know, it says so plainly and hands the conversation over rather than guessing.

It is an instructed model, not a rulebook engine, so read your transcripts for the first week. If it is getting something wrong repeatedly, the fix is almost always a missing fact on your product or policy page.

Handing off to you

The assistant marks a conversation as needing a person when the answer is not in your store's facts, and always for complaints, refunds on an existing order, bulk or custom orders, and anything that needs an action it cannot take.

When that happens the shopper sees a green Chat with a person on WhatsApp button under the reply, which opens a chat with your store. That button only appears if your store's WhatsApp chat bubble is switched on, under Settings → Sales boosters. If it is off, the assistant still says it is not sure, but the shopper has no one-tap way to reach you. Switch the WhatsApp bubble on before you switch the assistant on.

Hand-offs are counted on the card as Handed to you for the last seven days. A rising number is a signal, not a failure: it tells you which facts are missing from your store.

What it costs, and how to hold the spend down

One credit per shopper message. The assistant's own replies are not charged separately. Fifty shopper messages in a week is fifty credits out of your 1,500 a month. The card shows Conversations, Shopper messages and the credits they used for the last seven days, so you can see the real rate rather than guessing.

There is no rupee or credit limit you can set on this. Be plain with yourself about that before turning it on. What does exist:

• The switch itself. It is the only hard control, and it takes effect immediately.
• Sixty messages per shopper per day. One person cannot spend more than 60 of your credits in a day, however long they chat.
• Eight messages a minute from one internet connection, which stops a script hammering it.
• Automated traffic is refused before any credit is spent: known bot and crawler user agents are blocked, and a hidden field catches form-filling scripts.
• Your balance. When credits run out, the assistant stops answering and offers WhatsApp instead. A shopper never sees an error about your billing.

If a message fails on our side, the credit is returned automatically. In practice the sensible discipline is to switch it on, look at the numbers on the card after a week, and decide whether the conversations were worth what they cost. If the answer is no, switch it off.

Reading the conversations

Press Read recent conversations on the card. Each session is listed with its time and every line of the exchange, marked Shopper and Assistant, with a tag on any reply that was handed off to you. The refresh icon reloads them.

Do read these. They are the most honest customer research a small store can get: real questions in real words, including the ones people never bother to email you about. Fix your product descriptions and policy pages from what you find there.