Settings tour

The Shoesy AI admin sits inside your Shopify admin at Apps → Shoesy AI. It is organised as sections in the app navigation: Home, Analytics, Conversations, Knowledge, Catalog, Settings, Customize, Test assistant, and Plan & usage. Each section has its own URL, so you can bookmark it and the browser back/forward buttons work.

The status bar

Every section sits under the same status bar, so you never have to go looking for whether your assistant is actually working.

On the left is a small cluster of badges. The first is the verdict — one line answering "what do my shoppers see right now?"

Three things have to be true before shoppers see anything, and the verdict is green and reads Answering shoppers only when all three hold: the app embed is on in your published theme, a trial or plan is active, and Show the chat bubble on storefront is checked in Settings.

When exactly one of the three is closed, the verdict names that one, so you know what to go fix:

Hidden — chat bubble turned off — your own switch in Settings → Assistant behavior.
Hidden — embed off in theme — the app embed.
Hidden — trial not started / Hidden — subscription lapsed — billing.

When more than one is closed, the verdict reads Hidden from shoppers instead. That is deliberate rather than vague: no single gate is "the" reason when two are shut, and clearing one on its own would still show nobody anything. Every closed gate still explains itself, so you see the whole list rather than fixing one and being surprised: hovering the verdict states what shoppers see and, when the bubble switch is one of the closures, how to put it back, while an app embed that is off keeps its own line on the bar with a link into your theme editor.

A verdict that can't be reached reads Couldn’t check right now, which is not the same as "off" and says so.

Beside the verdict are plain grey fact badges: App embed on / App embed off (or Embed: couldn’t check), and Password-protected when your storefront has a password page. Hover or tab to any badge to see what was actually checked — for the embed, that is the app-embed setting in your published theme, read through the Shopify Admin API, which is what your theme says rather than what a shopper currently sees. The bubble switch and your billing state deliberately get no badge of their own: those are gates, and a gate shows up as the verdict itself — with a plan button beside it when billing is the one holding you back — while the badges report what the checks found.

Every control you might need stays on the bar rather than inside a tooltip: a Re-check button, a link into your theme editor when the embed is what's wrong, and a plan button when billing is. The one instruction that lives in hover info is the bubble switch — hover or tab to the Hidden — chat bubble turned off verdict and it tells you exactly where to turn it back on. That switch is also the one closure you can undo without leaving the dashboard: save it and the verdict updates by itself, with no Re-check needed. (The Re-check button is still there for the theme embed, which you change inside Shopify where we can't see the save.)

On the right, Try it now opens your storefront in a new tab through a short-lived preview link. That link is what lets you see the widget before your trial starts, when a plain storefront visit would show no bubble at all — you get the real bubble, panel, greeting, and chips. It will not answer questions for real yet, though: until a trial or plan is live, a typed question comes back with "Start your 14-day free trial to get live answers", and the panel says so in a banner. For real answers before you start a trial, use Test assistant. On a password-protected storefront, Shopify shows the password page first and the preview link does not survive it — enter the store password, then press Try it now again.

Above the tabs, a banner appears whenever billing is what is hiding your assistant — no trial started yet, or a lapsed subscription. It follows you across every section, so you cannot be deep in Customize and miss that nothing you are configuring is reaching anybody. The other two gates do not raise a banner; the verdict badge is where you see those.

The sections at a glance

Home — your home base. While you're getting set up it leads with a "Get the most out of Shoesy" setup checklist; once you have conversations coming in and have dismissed the checklist it leads with value instead — an ROI summary of what the assistant did for you, a one-line assisted-conversation usage summary, and a compact catalog-indexing status. Trial countdowns and catalog-cap alerts surface here. Dismissed the checklist and want it back? Use Show setup guide at the bottom of Home.
Analytics — trends and breakdowns: conversations per day, what shoppers ask, answer outcomes, and detected languages, with CSV export. The history window depends on your plan: 30 days on Starter, 90 on Growth, 365 on Pro.
Conversations — every conversation, paginated 25 per page with date-range / status / billing filters, each with its full transcript, a Resolved / Unresolved status, a Counted / Free billing chip, thumbs-up/down feedback, and — for return questions — the reason the shopper gave.
Knowledge — everything that teaches the assistant, on one page: your FAQ (verbatim answers to store-specific questions, answers Shoesy suggests from your own content, and quick-answer chips), Custom rules (banned phrases plus free-form guidance), and — on Growth and up — an Assistant behavior card with seven tuning controls: answer style (Concise / Balanced / Detailed), emoji use, follow-up questions, cross-sell suggestions, the reply-language checklist, your size-guide URL, and the escalation preference.
Catalog — your catalog-indexing status, a manual Reindex now button (force a re-sync after a bulk import or a major policy change), and — on Pro — catalog-quality flags for product pages that weaken the assistant's answers (missing sizes, thin descriptions, colours with no image, footwear without a size chart, price problems).
Settings — tone, support contact, the size system the assistant leads with, and the chat-bubble switches (this page).
Customize — how the widget looks, with a live preview beside the controls: accent colour, launcher position and icon, the greeting and opener chips, and branding. See Customize below.
Test assistant — an in-admin chat sandbox where you talk to your assistant against your real catalog before shoppers do. See Test assistant below.
Plan & usage — your assisted-conversation usage against your plan cap, your billing status, and a Manage plan button that hands you to Shopify's plan page for Shoesy AI, where you switch between Starter, Growth, and Pro at any time.

Tone

The assistant has three voice presets:

Friendly (default) — warm, plain language. Use this unless you have a reason not to.
Formal — full sentences, no contractions, no exclamation marks.
Casual — light and conversational, everyday phrasing, relaxed but never sloppy.

Tone also sets the greeting shoppers see when they open the chat, and the message they get when the assistant cannot answer and hands them to your support contact — in every language the widget supports, so the first line, the last line, and every reply between them sound like the same store. If you have written your own welcome message under Customize, that is used instead and tone leaves it alone.

Tone affects only phrasing. It does not change what the assistant knows or how confident it is in answers.

One line no tone can touch. Every opening message ends with a sentence telling the shopper they are talking to an AI — "You're chatting with an AI, not a human.", translated into whichever of the seven supported languages the shopper is using. It is appended after the greeting on every page type, in every tone, and after your own welcome message if you have written one. There is no setting to shorten, reword, or remove it: AI disclosure is a legal requirement, and it is also what the assistant will tell a shopper who asks outright whether they are talking to a person.

Support contact

Anything the assistant cannot confidently answer is escalated to your support contact. The Settings tab has two fields:

Support email — defaults to your Shopify shop contact email. Change it if you want a dedicated inbox.
Support form URL — an optional link to your contact page. When both are set, shoppers are pointed at the page rather than the email.

At least one of the two is required — onboarding will not complete with no contact path, because the assistant's hand-off would otherwise be a dead end. The wizard validates that an email looks like an email and that a URL starts with https:// (an http:// URL is rejected — the hand-off link must be secure). If, during onboarding, the email you enter differs from your Shopify shop contact, the wizard shows a non-blocking warning; either address is allowed.

Both switches sit under Assistant behavior on the Settings page, alongside tone and the support contact:

Show the chat bubble on storefront — the master switch. Turn it off to hide the widget without uninstalling the app. Storefronts stop showing the bubble straight away, and the status bar tells you the same story rather than staying green: the moment you save, the verdict flips to Hidden — chat bubble turned off on its own — you do not have to press Re-check — and hovering it points back at this switch. Saving it back on turns the verdict green again the same way.
Let shoppers hide the chat bubble — off by default. When enabled, the bubble gets a small close button; a shopper who taps it hides the bubble on that page, and it comes back on the next page they open — or if they refresh the page they are on. It is a way out of the shopper's way — not an off switch — so the assistant is still there for the rest of the visit. Turn it on if the bubble competes with your theme's own bottom-corner elements on some pages.

How the widget looks moved to its own Customize page (below), where every control sits next to a live preview.

Customize

The Customize page is a live editor: the controls are on the left and a preview of your storefront widget is on the right, so every change shows immediately — no need to open your storefront to check. A page switcher above the preview (Product / Collection / Home / Cart) lets you see how per-page opener chips appear. Nothing is saved until you press Save in the bar that appears when you make a change.

Accent colour — pick one of seven presets (the panel header, send button, and launcher bubble follow it). The default is oxblood, Shoesy's brand colour; the other six are indigo, blue, emerald, rose, amber, and slate. On Growth and Pro you can also enter a custom colour (a hex value or the colour picker). If a colour would make the header text hard to read, we tell you and keep your preset instead, so the assistant is never unreadable.
Launcher — which bottom corner the bubble sits in and how far it sits from the edges (Growth and Pro), plus a choice of launcher icon — speech bubble, sparkle, question mark, or shoe (Pro).
Greeting — a custom welcome message (up to 200 characters) and up to six tappable opener chips, each up to 40 characters, shown under the greeting (Growth and Pro). Tapping a chip sends its label to the assistant as the shopper's message, so write them the way a shopper would ask. On Pro you can scope a chip to a specific page type; otherwise chips show on every page. Your chips replace the built-in suggestions on the pages they appear on, so shoppers see your list and not both — and any page your chips do not cover keeps the built-in suggestions, so no page is left without prompts. Your welcome message replaces the built-in greeting, but never the AI-disclosure line, which is still appended underneath it.
Branding — remove the "Powered by Shoesy.AI" footer, available on the Pro plan (including during a Pro trial).

Controls above your plan stay visible but disabled, with a small Growth plan / Pro plan badge that links to Plan & usage — so you can always see what upgrading unlocks.

The storefront picks up a saved change on the next page load.

Test assistant

Test assistant is a full-width chat pane where you talk to your own assistant against your real catalog, before any shopper does. These test conversations are never billed and never show up in Analytics, Conversations, or your usage meter.

The first bubble is the real thing. The pane opens with the same opening message a shopper gets — your saved tone (or your own welcome message), your opener chips, and the AI-disclosure line — built from the same copy the storefront widget uses. If a greeting looks wrong here, it is wrong on your storefront too.
Simulate a page. Switch between Home page, Collection, and Product page. On Product you search and pick one of your own products, and the assistant anchors its answers to it — "what's it made of?" is a good first question.
Test unsaved changes. Override the tone for this test only and ask the same question twice to compare. A Testing unsaved changes badge shows while an override is active. Nothing here is saved — to make a tone stick for real shoppers, set it in Settings → Assistant behavior.

One thing the pane cannot show you is the launcher bubble itself: there is nothing to launch inside an embedded preview. Use Try it now in the status bar for that.

FAQ

The FAQ, on the Knowledge page, is where you guarantee the assistant's answers to questions that are specific to your store and that it could otherwise get wrong by inferring from product copy — returns windows, shipping cutoffs, pre-orders, drop schedules, and the like. It works in three ways:

Your own entries. Add a question / answer pair (optionally starting from a template). The assistant serves your answer verbatim when a shopper's question matches yours — either near-word-for-word or close in meaning — so this is how you fix a particular phrasing. Templates guard against shipping an answer with an unfilled placeholder.
Imported from your site. Shoesy drafts FAQ entries from your store's own FAQ page and lists them under an Imported from your site heading with a "to review" count. Approve, edit, or ignore each one — nothing is served to shoppers until you approve it.
Quick-answer chips. Pin an approved answer to a storefront quick-answer chip (for example a "Shipping & returns" chip, or a custom label) so shoppers can tap it before they even type.

Keep entries short, concrete, and directly quotable. Phrase the question the way a shopper would actually ask it: the assistant matches on the question's wording and meaning, so you rarely need a separate entry for every paraphrase. If a common phrasing keeps getting missed, add it as its own entry.

Custom rules

Custom rules, below the FAQ on the Knowledge page, are not about sizing — this is where you constrain the assistant's language and give it extra guidance:

Banned phrases — words or phrases the assistant will never use in a reply. Useful for terms you don't want associated with your brand or a competitor's name.
Additional instructions — short guidance the assistant follows in every reply, like notes for a new employee. Keep it brief and specific (for example: "Always mention that returns are free within 30 days").

For how sizing works and how brand size data is handled, see Sizing setup.

What is not configurable today

A few things are deliberately fixed in the current version and will become configurable later:

The widget's accessible name is AI Assistant. It is not renamable. (See Troubleshooting for why.)
The AI-disclosure line at the end of every opening message. It is a legal requirement, not a preference.
The "Powered by Shoesy.AI" line is required on Starter and Growth. Pro removes it via the branding toggle on the Customize page.
The list of pre-loaded sizing brands is not editable — the assistant uses the built-in cross-brand database plus your catalog's own variants.

If a setting you need is missing, email support@shoesy.ai.