The AI product assistant
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- 4.0 preview
- Updated
Audience: store owners and shop managers · Scope: what the assistant is, what it can and cannot do, and what running it involves · Last reviewed: 2026-08-11
The AI product assistant is a chat panel on your configurator pages and on the cart. Visitors ask questions in their own words — and their own language — and the assistant answers from your product data, makes selections for them, and guides them to a finished configuration.
It is off until you configure it; see Set up the assistant.
What it knows
The assistant is briefed from what your store already contains — it does not invent product facts:
- The product's pages, questions and answers, with their prices as your store calculates them.
- The descriptions you write on products, questions and answers.
- The product's detail panes — this is where it learns specifications, delivery terms, warranty conditions and anything else you put there. A well-filled set of detail panes is the single best way to make the assistant genuinely helpful.
- The visitor's live configuration: what is selected right now, what a rule currently allows, what is still open, and the running total.
When a visitor asks something your data does not answer, the assistant says so honestly — and files the gap on the wishlist so your team learns what is missing.
What it can do
- Explain and advise: compare options, explain why something is unavailable, answer "what would happen if…" questions without changing anything.
- Configure: make selections the visitor asks for, respecting every rule your product defines. Selections the rules forbid are refused, never forced.
- Guide the page: switch configurator pages and point at a question when the visitor asks to be shown something. The visitor sees the page move and the question highlighted.
- Finish the purchase: put the completed configuration in the cart — only when the visitor clearly asks for it, and only if you allow it in the settings.
- Work the cart: on the cart page it can change a line's quantity, remove a line, copy one so the visitor can configure a second that differs, or reopen a line for editing — the same things the buttons on the cart page do, and only if you allow it. It reads the basket first, so a visitor with several lines can talk about any of them, not just the one they came from.
When a visitor with more than one line says something that fits several of them, the assistant does not pick for them: it puts one button per line on screen and lets them tap the one they meant.
What it never does
- It never sees or invents prices — every figure comes from your store's own calculation.
- It never does anything a visitor could not do themselves on the page. It has no access to your administration, your orders, or other visitors' data.
- It never confirms a change on the visitor's behalf when a question is set to "let the customer confirm" — the visitor is always asked.
- It never pushes to the cart uninvited, and it respects the permissions you set.
- It never removes a line without asking first and being told yes in a later message, and the question always names the line it is about to remove — so a visitor with several lookalike rows can see which one is at stake.
- It never touches a line that is not in the cart in front of it: not another shopper's, and not one of the same visitor's own older carts. Once a cart has become an order it can only be read.
What running it involves
- An Anthropic API key — the assistant is powered by Claude. You pay Anthropic per message, in the range of cents; a rate limit per visitor keeps spend bounded. The key never leaves your server.
- A scheduled script if you use the conversation journal — it writes the per-conversation reviews and enforces the retention period. See Schedule the recurring scripts.
Where you see what it did
Every conversation is recorded in the conversation journal: what the visitor asked, what the assistant answered, every selection it made and why it took each action. The wishlist collects what your store was missing, Recommendations turns all of it into a living to-do list per team — with a contact and an email per group — and Conversation Insights shows how that list is moving.
The assistant above works for your visitors. The store can also open a door to an AI assistant that works for you — one you already use, given a token that says exactly what it may touch, so it can build products, write texts and rules, or read what visitors asked for. See Connect your own AI assistant.