Your product catalogue
Let your Aijent answer questions about your products, prices and stock, straight from your store.
If you run an online store, your Aijent can read your actual products and answer questions about prices, variants and differences between items. Add your store's address on the Knowledge tab exactly as you would any web page, and your Aijent works out it is a store. Shopify and WooCommerce are read directly; most other platforms work through the structured data they already publish.
If you run an online store, your Aijent can read your product catalogue and answer questions about individual products: what they cost, what they come in, what the difference is between two of them.
This is different from reading your website pages. A crawl reads what your pages say. A catalogue reads your actual products, as structured information, so your Aijent can answer precisely rather than approximately.
Adding it
You do not do anything special. Add your store's address the same way you would add any web content, on the Knowledge tab, and your Aijent works out that it is a store.
See adding web content.
What happens next depends on which option you chose:
- Just this one page, pointed at your store: your products are imported, and nothing else.
- This page and pages it links to: your products are imported and your content pages are read as well, so your Aijent gets your about page, delivery terms, returns policy and so on. Your product pages are deliberately left out of that crawl, because the catalogue already has them.
The second is usually what you want. Products alone cannot answer "what is your returns policy?".
Which stores work
Your Aijent tries several ways of reading your products, in order, and uses the first that works:
- Shopify
- WooCommerce
- Structured data, which many other platforms publish automatically
- Extracted, reading the product pages directly as a fallback
You will see which one was used on the catalogue in your Knowledge tab.
That means it is worth trying even if you are not on Shopify or WooCommerce. Most modern store platforms publish structured product data without you doing anything.
Keeping it current
Products change constantly, so unlike website content, a catalogue can be refreshed on demand. Use Refresh from the store on the catalogue.
Worth doing when:
- You add or discontinue products
- Your prices change
- You rename or re-describe things
Refreshing the catalogue is not the same as re-reading your website
Website content does not refresh itself and has no refresh button. Only the catalogue does. If your delivery terms change on a normal page, you need to remove that source and add it again.
If it does not work
"We reached the store but found no products in its catalogue." Your Aijent got to your store but could not find products. Usually the address points at a page rather than the store itself, or the store publishes nothing readable.
"We couldn't read this store's product catalogue." Your store blocked the attempt, or the platform is one none of the methods above could read. Point your Aijent at your product pages as ordinary web content instead: less precise, but it will still be able to answer.
Products import but answers are vague. Catalogues carry names, prices and descriptions. If your descriptions are thin in your store, they will be thin in your Aijent's answers. Improving them in your store improves both.
What it will not do
It will not take orders or process payments. Your Aijent can answer about a product and send somebody to it. Buying happens in your store.
It will not know live stock unless your store publishes it.
It will not invent a product. As everywhere else, if it is not in what your Aijent has, it says so rather than guessing.
Removing it
Delete the catalogue from your Knowledge tab. You will be told how many products that removes before you confirm.