How to Let AI Shopping Assistants Sell Your Products

To let AI shopping assistants sell your products, your store has to answer them directly: let an assistant search your catalog, read a product's real options and stock, and hand the shopper a link that opens your own checkout. On ShopsWired that is already switched on for your storefront — there is no app to install and nothing to configure. What's left for you is deciding whether to keep it on, and writing the one short note that stops assistants guessing about your store.

What is actually happening when a shopper "asks the AI"

A growing share of shoppers start with an assistant rather than a search box: "find me a waterproof hiking jacket under $200 in medium" or "is this available in navy?" The assistant then has two ways to answer. It can scrape and summarise whatever pages it can find — which is how you end up with confident answers about a size you discontinued last spring — or it can ask the store itself.

A ShopsWired storefront supports the second route. When a shopper's assistant talks to your store, it can:

• Search your catalog, and narrow results by tag, price or availability.
• Read a product's full details, including its options, its variants and what is actually in stock.
• Look up the store basics a shopper asks about: your currency, your delivery options and links to your pages.
• Turn a chosen basket into one checkout link, which the shopper opens to buy.

That's the whole list. It is deliberately the same information any visitor sees by browsing your site — the assistant just gets it in a form it can't misread.

What an assistant can never do in your store

The assistant is only given tools that read public catalog data and build a link. Everything else is out of reach.

• It can't see orders, customers or anything about a shopper. Not your order history, not a returning customer's details, not the shopper it is working for.
• It can't change anything in your store. Not a price, not a product, not a setting.
• It can't buy. The link it produces opens your normal checkout, where the shopper enters their own address and pays themselves. Nothing is charged unless a person completes that checkout.

The part merchants tend to care about most is pricing. The checkout link carries products, quantities and chosen options — never a price. Every amount is worked out by your store when the link is built, and again when the shopper opens it. An assistant that quotes a stale price, or simply invents one, can't make that price real at your checkout. The shopper pays what your store says, not what the assistant said.

The one setting, and why it's on by default

You'll find it under Settings → General → AI Shopping Assistants. It ships switched on because it exposes nothing your storefront doesn't already show: an assistant sees the products, prices and pages any anonymous visitor can see.

There are honest reasons to turn it off. If you sell to approved trade buyers and your public catalog is a teaser rather than the real offer, an assistant can only ever describe the teaser. If your products need a conversation before purchase — made-to-measure work, anything with a consultation step — a one-click checkout link may be the wrong path into your store. And if you simply don't want to be part of that channel yet, switching it off is a legitimate choice. For most stores selling standard products at public prices, though, leaving it on costs nothing.

Write the note assistants read first

The most useful thing you can do takes about five minutes. You can write a short note that an assistant reads before it answers a shopper about your store. It is the fastest way to stop one guessing about the things your product pages don't spell out.

Good notes are short, factual and about the questions shoppers actually ask an assistant. For example:

• “We only ship within the EU.”
• “Sizes run small — suggest one size up.”
• “Engraved items can't be returned.”
• “Orders placed before 2pm on a weekday ship the same day.”

Two rules of thumb. Only write what is true today — the note is read as fact, so a promise you stopped keeping in March becomes a promise an assistant repeats in November. And don't use it for marketing copy; an assistant answering “does this fit true to size?” has no use for your brand story.

Your catalog is the rest of the job

Because the assistant reads your actual product data, the quality of that data is what it has to work with. The same habits that help human shoppers and search engines help here:

• Model options as real variants. “Medium, navy” should be a variant with its own stock, not a sentence in the description. An assistant can tell a shopper a variant is out of stock; it can't reliably parse a paragraph that says so.
• Tag consistently. Assistants can narrow your catalog by tag. If half your jackets are tagged “waterproof” and the other half “water-proof”, half of them disappear from that search.
• Keep stock accurate. Availability is one of the filters an assistant can apply, and a product that shows in stock but isn't produces exactly the kind of bad experience that gets blamed on you, not the assistant.
• Put the hard facts in plain words. Materials, dimensions, compatibility. An assistant asked “will this fit a 15-inch laptop?” can only answer from what you wrote.

None of this is assistant-specific work — the same data drives your storefront's own filters and search results.

Going further: answers from your own systems

The built-in tools cover the catalog. Some questions live elsewhere — “which of your shops has this in stock?”, “can I collect it today?” An installed plugin can offer shoppers' assistants tools of its own, so those questions can be answered from your own systems rather than left to a guess.

Those plugin tools work under the same rules as the built-in ones: the caller is anonymous, so a well-built tool only ever returns what you would print on a product page. And they're separately switchable — you can turn plugin tools off while keeping catalog search on. If you or a developer want to build one, the AI Assistants section of the features guide lists exactly what each side can reach.

Where this is the wrong expectation

Two caveats, so the rest of this is credible.

First, answering assistants is not the same as being recommended by them. Your store can give an assistant accurate, structured answers; whether a particular shopper's assistant reaches your store in the first place depends on that assistant, and no platform can promise you that traffic. Treat this as making sure that when you are asked, the answer is right.

Second, the assistant never completes the purchase. If what you want is an agent that pays on the shopper's behalf with no checkout step, this isn't that — by design. The shopper always finishes on your checkout, which is also why an assistant can never charge anyone for something they didn't confirm.

What it costs

Plans are per shop: Starter at $29/mo runs a full store on ready-made themes and plugins, Pro is $99/mo and adds building your own plugins, then Business at $249/mo, Enterprise at $499/mo, and Dedicated for custom needs. Right now Starter or Pro is $1/mo for the first three months. ShopsWired charges 0% platform transaction fees on what you sell — you still pay your payment processor's standard rate, and nothing to us on top. Full details are on the pricing page.

The short answer

Let assistants talk to your store directly instead of scraping it. On ShopsWired that's on by default: an assistant can search your catalog, read real variants and stock, and build a checkout link it cannot price, while orders, customers and payments stay out of its reach. Write a short, true note for assistants, keep your variants, tags and stock clean, and switch it off only if your public catalog isn't your real offer.