Industry
Onboarding automation for ecommerce and retail
Pre-purchase questions arrive in DMs at midnight and an unanswered one is an abandoned cart.
Ecommerce support questions are pre-purchase questions wearing a support costume. Sizing, stock, delivery time, whether it fits the model they own. Each one is a customer holding a full cart, waiting.
The volume is high, the questions repeat, and the answers exist already in your product data. That combination is unusual and it is why automation pays here faster than almost anywhere else.
The judgement call is which questions the agent should answer, and which need a person. Get that boundary wrong and you either annoy customers or leave money on the table.
Before automation
How the journey usually runs today
Written from how these teams actually work, so you can find the step that matches yours.
- 01
Question arrives
Instagram DM, WhatsApp, a comment under a product post, or the site chat widget.
- 02
Queued with support
Alongside order issues and returns, in the same undifferentiated inbox.
- 03
Answered in business hours
Which is not when people shop.
- 04
Cart status unknown
The person answering has no idea there is a full basket attached.
Failure points
Where it actually breaks
Not generic funnel advice. These are the four failures that show up again and again in this industry.
A pre-purchase question queued behind a returns ticket
Both are support tickets to the inbox. One of them is a customer with a card in their hand and the other is not.
Peak demand lands outside working hours
Evening browsing is when questions arrive. An answer the next morning arrives after the decision was made.
Abandoned cart recovery only runs on email
The customer asked in a DM and gets chased by email, on a channel they never used, from a sender they do not recognise.
The same twenty questions, answered by hand, forever
Sizing and delivery questions repeat endlessly and every one of them is answered from scratch by a person.
What we build here
The solutions that matter most in this industry
Journey articles
Journeys written for ecommerce and retail
Every article here sits at this industry and one journey. The same article appears on that journey's page.
FAQs
Ecommerce and retail automation questions
Should the AI agent handle returns as well as pre-purchase questions?
Split them first, then decide. A pre-purchase question is a customer with a full basket and a returns request is not, and treating them as one queue is the most expensive queueing decision in ecommerce.
Where does the agent get stock and sizing answers?
From your product data, not from a general model. An improvised answer about stock produces a refund and a bad review, so the agent either knows or escalates.
Does abandoned cart recovery work on WhatsApp?
It works considerably better than email when the customer started the conversation there, because you are replying on a channel they chose rather than chasing them on one they did not. Meta's rules on what you may send outside the messaging window still apply.
Can you connect this to Shopify or WooCommerce?
Yes. Both expose the order, customer and catalogue APIs this needs, which also lets the agent recognise a returning customer rather than treating them as a stranger.
Map your ecommerce and retail journey
Bring the way leads reach you today. You leave with the sequence drawn out, the tools named and a realistic cost band, whether or not you build it with us.