Brainerce HelpStorefront bot
An AI assistant on your storefront that answers shopper questions from your catalog and your own notes, and tells you what it couldn't answer.
The storefront bot is a chat assistant for your shoppers. It answers questions, finds products, tells people where their order is, and helps them buy, on your site.
Its defining constraint is worth stating first: it only answers from your catalog and what you tell it. It does not improvise store policy. If it hasn't been told your returns window, it won't invent one.
Find it at Customers → Storefront Bot. The page has three tabs (Conversations, Analytics and Studio) and everything you configure lives in Studio, under its three sections: Persona, Knowledge and Behavior.
Teaching it about your store
Under Studio → Knowledge, add the things a shopper asks that a product page doesn't answer: shipping times, returns policy, sizing guidance, brand voice.
The custom instructions field is the highest-leverage thing here. Anything you put in it, the bot always knows:
We ship worldwide in 3 to 5 business days. Free returns within 30 days. Always mention our loyalty programme.
Personality and avatar
Under Studio → Persona you set how the bot sounds and pick its avatar. Match it to how you'd want a person on your shop floor to talk. That is the whole job.
What the bot is allowed to do
Studio → Behavior has five switches. Turning one off doesn't just hide a feature: the bot genuinely loses the ability, so it can't promise something you've disabled.
| Switch | Default | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Product Q&A | On | Answers questions about products, specs and availability, and can add items to the cart. Switching it off leaves a bot that can't discuss your products at all. |
| Recommendations | On | Suggests products based on what the shopper is looking for. Needs Product Q&A on as well. |
| Order tracking | On | Looks up order status and shipping updates. See below. |
| Returns & refunds | On | Explains your return policy and guides refunds, using what you wrote under Knowledge. |
| Bundle nudges | Off | Suggests add-ons and bundles to grow order value. Needs Product Q&A on as well. The one switch that starts off, so turn it on deliberately. |
Escalation to your team can't be switched off. Even with everything above disabled, a shopper can still leave a message.
Order tracking: "where is my order?"
This is the most common thing shoppers ask a chat widget, and it's on by default. The bot looks up that shopper's own recent orders and their shipping status. It never asks for an order number or an email address. It identifies people from the account they're already signed in to, so it can't be talked into revealing someone else's order.
It only works if your storefront was built to pass the shopper's login through to the bot. If it wasn't, the bot treats every shopper as a guest and answers that it can't find an order, for everyone, always. Nothing warns you: the switch above still reads Order tracking, on. If shoppers tell you the bot can't find their orders, this is why, and it's a change your developer makes on the storefront, not a setting here. Send them to the storefront bot integration guide.
Shoppers only ever see orders placed through the sales channel the bot is running on.
Conversations
Every chat is listed under Conversations, with a summary. Read these: they are the least filtered account you will ever get of what confuses people about your store.
A conversation can escalate to your team when the bot can't help, and those land in Inquiries so they don't get lost in a chat log nobody checks.
Analytics
Conversations per day, escalation counts, and the one to actually act on: what shoppers looked for and didn't find.
That list is a product-gap report. Sometimes it means you don't stock something. More often it means you do stock it but under a name nobody searches for.
Turning it on
Three things all have to be true before a shopper sees the bot:
- A connected storefront. The bot lives on your site, so there has to be a sales channel to attach it to.
- The bot switched Live in Studio. It starts off: until you switch it Live the widget shows nothing at all, even when the code is already on your site.
- The widget added to your storefront, which is one line of code your developer adds once.
It is also a module. If you don't want it at all, switch it off under Settings → Modules.
If all three are done and the bot still doesn't appear, the widget stays silent rather than showing an error, and there are only a few possible causes: the bot isn't Live, your AI credits have run out, or the sales channel's domain doesn't match the site the bot is loading on. Check the domain on the sales channel first. That's the one that bites when you move a working storefront to a new address.
What's next?
- Contact inquiries is where escalated conversations arrive.
- Connect your storefront is required before the bot has anywhere to live.
Automatic welcome and follow-up emails
Two emails that send themselves, a welcome email for new customers and a follow-up after delivery. What triggers each one, whether your existing customers get mailed, and how to turn one on.
Loyalty & Rewards
A built-in points program where customers earn points on every purchase and redeem them for discounts. Tiers, bonuses, referrals, and birthday gifts included.