AI customer support for Shopify stores
helpo indexes your Shopify catalog beside your shipping and returns pages, then answers in a chat widget on your storefront — with live price and stock awareness, and a handoff to your team the moment someone needs an order changed.
Store support is five questions and a queue
The same five questions, all day
Where is my order. When does it ship. Can I return this. Is it in stock in medium. Which one should I buy. None of them are hard. All of them need answering, and every one of them is a person waiting.
A chatbot that has not read your catalog
Most widgets answer from a help page and stop there. Ask whether the blue one is back in stock and you get a link to the contact form — which is worse than no chat at all, because the customer already tried.
Traffic does not keep your hours
A good share of store traffic arrives when nobody is at a desk. An unanswered question at 2am is not a ticket for tomorrow; it is usually a cart that never got finished.
How the Shopify customer service chatbot gets built
In your project's knowledge base, choose Import store and paste your storefront URL. helpo reads the public products.json your storefront already serves, shows a preview of what it found, and indexes titles, descriptions, prices and stock. No app install and no API token for this half — there is nothing helpo could write to your shop.
Crawl your shipping, returns and FAQ pages, or paste the answers in as Q&A pairs. Product questions are half of store support; the other half is when it arrives and whether it can go back.
Paste the script tag into your theme layout, or install the helpo app from the dashboard — the app embeds the widget for you. With the app connected, your store pushes order updates to helpo, so order status is answerable and a human sees the order beside the conversation.
What it does once it is live
Product cards in the conversation
When a reply is about a product, the product arrives with it — image, price, stock — instead of a paragraph describing it.
Price and stock aware answers
The catalog is a knowledge source, not a static FAQ. Re-syncs pick up new prices and sold-out variants, and re-indexing swaps content atomically so the widget never answers from an empty source.
Policy answers that cite your pages
Every answer links back to the chunk it came from, so a returns answer points at your returns page rather than at a plausible guess.
One-click takeover
Claim any live thread from the shared inbox. The AI steps aside, the transcript stays visible, and the customer is talking to a person without starting over. Team plan.
Order context in the inbox
With the app connected, the order sits next to the conversation, so whoever picks it up is not asking for an order number that the customer already typed.
Alerts where your team already is
Route new conversations, takeover requests, leads and tickets to Slack, Discord, Lark or your own endpoint, with keyword and priority filters.
Common questions
Does helpo need access to my Shopify admin?
Not for the catalog. The import reads your storefront's public products.json, the same file a browser can fetch, so there is no token and nothing to approve. The app install is a separate, approved step, and even then the store pushes order updates to helpo rather than helpo holding credentials that could read your shop.
Can the AI cancel, refund or edit an order?
No, and it will not pretend it can. It answers questions and, when a request needs a change made in Shopify, it hands the conversation to your team. A human does the change in Shopify.
What happens when a price or a stock level changes?
The catalog source re-syncs, and re-indexing replaces its chunks atomically. Between syncs the AI answers from the last import, so treat stock as close rather than live if you sell out in minutes.
How do I install it on my theme?
One script tag before the closing body tag in your theme layout, or install the helpo app from the dashboard's Shopify screen and it embeds the widget for you. What the tag loads is a loader, not the chat app — the conversation UI is only fetched when somebody opens it.
What does it cost for a small store?
The free plan is one project, 20 AI replies a day, no card and no time limit — enough to see it answering real customers on a real storefront. Starter is $29/mo. Human takeover and tickets are on the Team plan at $99/mo.
Where to go next
Put your support on autopilot
Train helpo on your product today. Your customers get answers in seconds — your team gets their time back.