Getting Started

Install Shop Buddy from the Shopify App Store, onto the store you want it on. You need to be the store owner, or a staff account with permission to install apps.

Each store is its own installation, with its own catalog, knowledge base, settings and plan. If you run several stores, install it on each one separately.

During install Shopify shows you exactly what the app is asking for. Here is what each one is used for:

• Read products — reads your products, their titles, descriptions, prices, images and variants, so the assistant answers from your real catalog and only recommends things you actually sell.
• Read store content — reads your pages, blog posts and policies, so shipping, returns and how-it-works answers come from your own published wording instead of a guess.
• Read orders— looks up a single order's status and tracking, only when the shopper supplies both the order number and the email the order was placed with. It also matches completed orders back to the chat that preceded them, which is what the Analytics section reports on.
• Read inventory— adds exact stock counts to inventory answers. Without it the assistant still tells shoppers whether something is in stock; it just can't say how many are left.
• Write draft orders — lets the assistant build a draft order the shopper can check out with. This does nothing until you switch the feature on yourself (step 8).
• Write discounts — lets the assistant create a discount code. Also does nothing until you switch it on (step 8).

The app does not read your customer records. Everything it knows about a shopper is either typed into the chat by them or derived from their browsing on your storefront — see the Privacy Policy.

Shop Buddy runs embedded inside the Shopify admin. Open it from Appsin your admin sidebar. Shop Buddy's own sections — Home, Knowledge, Actions & permissions, Analytics, Plan & Usage and the rest — appear in the left nav while the app is open.

On first open you'll see a Getting started card summarising these steps. You can dismiss it and bring it back later from the footer link.

Before anything else, scroll to the Products card on the Home screen and click Sync products now. Until your catalog is synced and indexed, the assistant has nothing of yours to recommend. A large catalog can take a few minutes. The card shows how many products are synced and how many are searchable by the bot.

On the app's Home screen, the Chatbot appearance card controls how the assistant looks and sounds:

• Bot name — what the assistant calls itself.
• Welcome message — the first thing a shopper sees when they open the chat.
• Bubble color — the colour of the chat bubble on your storefront.
• Tone — Standard, Enthusiastic, or Professional.
• System prompt override — optional, for when you want to give the assistant specific instructions of your own.
• Suggested prompts — the quick-reply chips shoppers see before they type anything, for example "What sizes do you carry?". Leave them empty and shoppers just see the welcome message.

Click Save changeswhen you're done. Only Owners and Admins can change the bot's configuration; other team members can view it.

The catalog answers questions about products. Everything else — shipping, returns, sizing, opening hours, how your business works — comes from the Knowledge section. This is the single biggest thing you can do to make answers good.

In the Knowledge base card you can:

• Sync Shopify content — imports your existing Shopify pages, blog posts and policies in one click. Start here.
• Crawl my storefront — walks your storefront and pulls in the page content it finds. This takes a minute or so.
• Add a URL — ingest one specific page.
• Write FAQs by hand, for anything that isn't published anywhere.

Below it, the Store info card holds a short structured profile — hours, contact details, shipping and returns — and can also pull in your collections and customer reviews.

Once the assistant is live, check the Gapssection regularly. Every question it couldn't answer is logged there, and you can draft, review and approve an answer that goes straight into the knowledge base.

Nothing appears on your storefront until you enable the app embed. It ships as a Shopify theme app embed, so it does not modify your theme files and is safe to switch off again.

1. In your Shopify admin, go to Online Store → Themes.
2. Click Customize on your live theme.
3. Open App embeds in the theme editor sidebar.
4. Turn on Shop Buddy Chatbot.
5. Click Save.

The embed has two optional settings, and you should leave both alone. Public key (optional) should stay blank — the widget resolves its key automatically from a metafield on your shop, and the field only exists as an override. Platform URL should stay on its default unless we have specifically asked you to change it.

If your store has published a privacy policy, the widget links to it from its footer; otherwise it links to ours.

Open your storefront and look for the chat bubble in the corner. Then actually use it — the fastest way to find gaps is to ask the questions your shoppers ask:

• A product question you know the answer to ("do you have this in blue?"), to check the catalog synced properly.
• A policy question ("what's your returns window?"), to check your knowledge sources landed.
• Something deliberately obscure, to see how it behaves when it doesn't know — and then check that the question showed up under Gaps.

Answers are AI-generated and can occasionally be wrong or incomplete. The more accurate your catalog and knowledge, the better they get. Re-test after any significant change.

Beyond answering questions, the assistant can do things on a shopper's behalf. These live under Actions & permissions in the app, and each is a separate switch.

If the order and discount switches are greyed out, the app is missing the Shopify permissions they need. The section shows which ones, with a button to open your Shopify admin — reopening Shop Buddy from there prompts you to approve them.

Our Support page goes further on install problems, sync issues and error messages. For anything not covered, email support@softora.store with your store domain and what you were trying to do — the Contact page lists what to include so we can answer on the first reply.

To remove Shop Buddy, uninstall it from Apps in your Shopify admin, or turn the app embed off to hide the chat without uninstalling. What happens to your data either way is set out on our Data Deletion page.