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Getting your MerchantAI agent live involves a handful of deliberate steps — from creating your workspace and connecting your content, through to tuning guardrails and dropping the widget onto your site. This guide walks you through every stage in order, so you arrive at a tested, production-ready agent rather than one that surprises you in front of real customers.
1

Create your workspace

Sign up at merchantai.io and create your first workspace. Each workspace maps to a single website or Shopify store — it holds the agent’s knowledge base, brand voice settings, handover configuration, and analytics for that property. If you run multiple stores or brands, you create a separate workspace for each one.
2

Connect your site

Enter your website URL in the Sources panel. MerchantAI’s crawler indexes your public pages automatically — product pages, policy documents, blog posts, and general content — so the agent can answer questions grounded in your actual site content. The crawler re-runs whenever you trigger a manual sync or (for Shopify) when a product or policy update is detected.
3

Add knowledge sources

Supplement the crawled content with any additional material your agent needs to know:
  • PDFs and DOCX files — upload sizing guides, specification sheets, warranty documents, or internal FAQs.
  • Q&A pairs — add discrete question-and-answer entries for questions you know visitors ask but that aren’t covered well by your existing pages.
  • Shopify catalogue — if your workspace is connected to a Shopify store, install the MerchantAI Shopify app to sync products, variants, collections, policies, and blog posts automatically. The sync updates on store changes via webhooks, so pricing and inventory stay current.
All sources you add are scoped to this workspace only and are never shared across agents.
4

Set your brand voice

Navigate to Configuration → Brand Voice. You can either select one of the built-in presets (Friendly, Professional, Concise, Warm) as a starting point, or write a fully custom system prompt. The system prompt is the core instruction document that governs how your agent introduces itself, what tone it uses, what it should never say, and when it should escalate to a human. See the Brand Voice guide for a full walkthrough.
5

Configure guardrails

In Configuration → Guardrails, set the confidence threshold that determines when the agent answers versus when it hands over to a human. A lower threshold means the agent is more cautious and escalates more often; a higher threshold means it attempts to answer in more ambiguous situations. You can also add topic blocklists — specific subjects (for example, medical advice, legal questions, or competitor comparisons) that the agent should always decline and redirect to your team.
6

Set up handover

Decide how you want unanswered or escalated conversations to reach your team:
  • Email handover — enter an email address under Configuration → Handover. When handover is triggered, MerchantAI sends a notification with the full conversation transcript, visitor contact details, source pages referenced, and a timestamp.
  • Contacts inbox — every handover conversation also appears in the Contacts inbox in your dashboard, where a team member can review history or take over the conversation live.
See the Handover guide for detailed setup instructions.
7

Preview your agent

Before you send a single real visitor to your agent, use the Preview chat in the dashboard. Ask the kinds of questions your customers actually ask — product questions, delivery questions, edge cases, and anything you’d be embarrassed to see a bad answer to. Adjust the system prompt, knowledge sources, or guardrail settings based on what you observe. The preview runs against your live configuration, so what you see is exactly what visitors will get.
8

Deploy

When you’re satisfied with the preview, deploy the widget:
  • Shopify — install the MerchantAI app from the Shopify App Store. The chat widget appears on your storefront automatically. Custom themes can paste the single <script> tag instead.
  • Any other website — copy the JS widget snippet from Configuration → Deploy and paste it before the closing </body> tag on your site.
Your agent is now live and answering visitor questions.

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Workspace settings

A few workspace-level settings are worth reviewing once your agent is up and running:
  • Workspace name — used internally to identify this property in your dashboard. Useful if you manage multiple workspaces.
  • Agent name — the display name visitors see in the chat header (for example, “Mia” or “Support”). You can update this at any time without redeploying.
  • Language and locale — set the primary language your agent responds in. MerchantAI will match the agent’s default language to this setting, though it can detect and respond to visitor messages in other languages where content is available.
Don’t rush through the preview step. Spending 20–30 minutes testing real customer phrasing before going live is the single best way to catch gaps in your knowledge sources and awkward responses in your system prompt — before visitors do.

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Multiple agents

If you operate more than one website, brand, or Shopify store, you can create additional agents within your account:
  • Pro plan — supports up to 3 agents, each in its own workspace with independent knowledge bases, brand voice, and handover settings.
  • Business plan — supports up to 5 agents, suited to multi-brand retailers or agencies managing several properties.
Each agent is fully isolated — knowledge, configuration, contacts, and analytics never cross workspace boundaries.