Training Your MerchantAI Agent with a Knowledge Base

Your agent’s quality depends entirely on what it knows. MerchantAI lets you build a knowledge base from multiple source types — your live website, uploaded documents, hand-crafted Q&A pairs, and your Shopify catalogue — so every answer the agent gives is grounded in content you have approved. The more complete and up-to-date your knowledge base is, the more confidently your agent can help visitors without escalating to a human.

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What the knowledge base contains

MerchantAI can index content from the following source types:

• Website crawl — MerchantAI crawls the pages on your domain and indexes their text content for retrieval.
• Uploaded files — PDF and DOCX files you upload directly from the dashboard, such as product manuals, internal policies, or FAQ documents.
• Q&A pairs — Individual question-and-answer entries you write manually, useful for queries that need precise, controlled wording.
• Shopify catalogue — When your Shopify store is connected, MerchantAI automatically indexes your products, variants, collections, store policies, and blog posts, and keeps them in sync via webhooks whenever your catalogue changes.

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Adding website sources

You can point MerchantAI at any URL and it will crawl the pages it finds there, extracting text content and making it available for retrieval.

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Uploading files

If you have important content that lives in documents rather than on your website — such as detailed FAQs, product manuals, or internal policy guides — you can upload PDF and DOCX files directly from the dashboard. Navigate to Knowledge → Files, drag in your documents, and MerchantAI will parse and index them automatically. Uploaded files are treated the same as website sources: they must be approved before the agent can draw on them.

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Creating Q&A pairs

For questions that come up frequently and require a specific, carefully worded answer, Q&A pairs give you the most control. Navigate to Knowledge → Q&A Pairs and add an entry for each question. The agent will prefer a matching Q&A pair over a retrieved passage when the visitor’s query is a close match, making this the best tool for guaranteeing consistent answers on sensitive topics like returns, shipping timelines, or pricing.

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Shopify catalogue

When you connect your Shopify store to MerchantAI, your catalogue is indexed automatically. No manual uploads or crawl configuration are needed for Shopify content.

What gets indexed from Shopify

• Products — titles, descriptions, tags, and metadata for every active product
• Variants — size, colour, material, and other variant attributes
• Collections — collection names, descriptions, and their product associations
• Policies — your store’s shipping, refund, and privacy policies
• Blog posts — published blog content, useful for answering questions about guides, how-tos, and announcements

Shopify content is kept in sync automatically. When you update a product description, change a policy, or publish a new blog post, MerchantAI receives a webhook notification and re-syncs the affected content. You do not need to trigger a manual re-index for Shopify changes.

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Knowledge base limits by plan

The total size of your knowledge base — across all source types — is capped by your plan. File sizes, crawl content, and Q&A pairs all count toward this limit. If you are approaching your limit, consider removing outdated sources, consolidating duplicate content, or upgrading your plan. Enterprise customers can discuss custom limits with the MerchantAI team.