Intro to AI Agent's Shopping Assistant skills (Early Access)Updated 7 days ago

Shopping Assistant is a skill set that allows your AI Agent to autonomously help shoppers find and buy products from your Shopify store. When you enable AI Agent on Chat, Shopping Assistant proactively guides shoppers toward a purchase by answering product questions, making personalized recommendations, and offering discounts when needed.

Requirements

• You must have an active AI Agent subscription
• You must have a Shopify store connected to Gorgias
  
  
  • AI Agent is not supported on BigCommerce, Magento or WooCommerce stores
• You must have AI Agent enabled on Chat
  
  
  • You can install Chat on any page of your website, including the Shopify checkout and thank you pages.

Adaptive conversations with shoppers

Like a sales associate in a physical store, Shopping Assistant observes shoppers who visit your website to understand their needs and inform its approach to selling.

When a shopper interacts with Chat on your website, Shopping Assistant intelligently adapts the conversation based on the shopper’s buying stage, your selling style and discount settings, as well as brand-specific knowledge.

Using these inputs, Shopping Assistant makes real-time decisions about when to ask shoppers clarifying questions, when to share product details and comparisons, and when to make tailored recommendations or offer discounts.

• The shopper’s buying stage → what is the shopper’s intent on your store’s website (discovery, interested, or ready to buy)?
  
  
  • Shopping Assistant observes the shopper’s browsing activity, cart status and purchase history to understand their preferences and journey, so long as the shopper remains on the same device and isn’t using incognito mode on their browser.
  • Shopping Assistant uses these signals to identify the shopper’s buying stage or level of interest (discovery, interested or ready to buy) — "Is the shopper just looking around, interested in a specific product, or about to make a purchase?"
  • The AI uses the shopper’s buying stage as a key factor to adapt conversations in real time, and make decisions about when to consult, when to make product recommendations, and when to offer discounts to complete a sale
• Selling style and discount settings → you control how Shopping Assistant approaches conversations with shoppers and how it uses discount codes. Adjust these preferences in AI Agent’s selling style and discount settings.
  
  
  • In addition to the shopper’s buying stage, Shopping Assistant uses selling style settings to take into account your brand’s preferences when interacting with shoppers. Does your brand prefer to educate and offer assistance without pressure? Or do you prioritize urgency and strong calls-to-action to generate sales?
  • Similarly, discount settings affect how and when Shopping Assistant uses discount codes to encourage a sale. A Shopping Assistant with an Educational selling style and Conservative discount strategy won’t use discounts for a shopper who’s still in a Discovery buying stage.

Brand-specific knowledge and guidance

To successfully handle conversations with shoppers, your Shopping Assistant pulls from brand-specific knowledge including your Help Center articles, webpages, external documents, and custom Guidance that you provide.

Shopping Assistant also has access to your Shopify product catalog, including titles, descriptions, tags and images.

• Your product catalog → Shopping Assistant uses your product catalog to answer questions about your products and make intelligent recommendations
  
  
  • Note: you can use Shopify tags to prevent Shopping Assistant from recommending certain products. Learn more.
• Your policies and FAQs → you can give Shopping Assistant necessary content about your brand by onboarding it with knowledge from your Help Center, website or external files. Think about pricing information, sizing guides, warranty info, and so on.
• Your sales playbook → just like a human sales associate, use Guidance to teach Shopping Assistant about situational best practices, objection handling, and how to approach common sales topics.
  
  
  • For example, you might use Guidance to instruct Shopping Assistant to “always ask if the visitor is shopping for themselves or someone else before continuing discovery.”

Product recommendations and discounts

Shopping Assistant can make product recommendations and dynamically offer discounts to shoppers directly in Chat. These actions are situational, based on the shopper’s buying stage , as well as your selling style and discount settings.

For example, if Shopping Assistant observes that a shopper is just browsing (Discovery stage), it will prioritize answering questions and sharing information over suggesting products, especially if your selling style is set to Educational.

• When Shopping Assistant does make a product recommendation, it shares a Shopify product card in the Chat conversation
  
  
  • Shoppers can select the product card to go to the product page or add the item directly to cart.
• When Shopping Assistant offers a discount, it creates a new unique discount code in your Shopify admin, limited to a single use. The value of the discount is based on the fixed discount % in your settings.. Learn more about discount settings.

Monitor sales conversations in one place

Any conversations that Shopping Assistant has with customers appear as tickets in your helpdesk inbox — just look for AI Agent’s Sales and Discount ticket Views.

AI Agent organizes tickets into these Views so that you can filter for conversations that were identified as a sales opportunity by Shopping Assistant or conversations where a discount code was shared.

1. Select Tickets from the main menu
2. Scroll down to find the section of Views for ✨ AI Agent
3. Select Sales or Discount Views to see conversations with Shopping Assistant
   
   
   • If needed, create new Views to organize your conversations

Get started with Shopping Assistant 

Complete the following steps to get started with AI Agent’s Shopping Assistant skills:

• Add Chat on your store’s website
• Onboard AI Agent with brand-specific knowledge
• Enable AI Agent on Chat
• Review our best practices to optimize AI Agent for selling

FAQs

How do I prevent Shopping Assistant from recommending a product?

If you have a product(s) that you do not want Shopping Assistant to recommend, you can exclude the product using a tag in Shopify.

Go to your products in Shopify. Under “product organization” add gorgias_do_not_recommend as a tag to the product. Shopping Assistant will no longer recommend the product in conversations so long as the tag remains.