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Getting your MerchantAI agent live is straightforward. Most businesses complete the setup in a single session — no engineering work, no third-party integrations to untangle, and no content migration to worry about. You point MerchantAI at your website, shape how the agent behaves, and deploy it with one click or a single script tag. The steps below walk you through the full process from sign-up to your first live conversation.
1

Create your account

Go to merchantai.io and start your free trial. No credit card is required — your 14-day trial gives you full access to configure and preview your agent before any billing begins. Once you sign up, you’ll land in the dashboard where all setup happens.
2

Add your website

Enter your website URL in the Knowledge setup screen. MerchantAI crawls your pages and automatically builds a knowledge base from the content it finds — service descriptions, FAQs, policies, product pages, and blog posts are all indexed. You can also supplement the crawl by uploading files (PDF or DOCX), pasting plain text, or adding manual Q&A pairs for anything your pages don’t cover explicitly.
3

Configure your agent

Shape how your agent behaves before it speaks to a single visitor. In the Settings panel you can:
  • Set tone and brand voice — choose a persona preset or write your own system prompt in plain English to match your brand’s style and language.
  • Define guardrails — set confidence thresholds, add topic blocklists (for example, blocking medical or legal advice), and configure escalation rules so the agent hands off when it should not answer.
  • Configure handover — decide whether escalations go to your email inbox, the dashboard Contacts view, or both, and add the contact details your team needs to follow up.
Use the Preview tool to ask the agent your own questions and check that answers are accurate and on-brand before you expose it to real visitors.
4

Deploy to your website

How you deploy depends on your platform:Shopify storesInstall the MerchantAI app directly from the Shopify App Store. Once installed, the chat widget appears on your storefront automatically. No theme edits or code changes are needed for standard Shopify themes; custom or headless setups can paste the provided <script> tag instead.All other websitesCopy the JS widget snippet from your dashboard and paste it before the closing </body> tag on your site. The snippet is a single <script> tag — one line, no dependencies, and no rebuild required. The widget will appear on every page where you place the tag.
<!-- Paste this before the closing </body> tag -->
<script src="https://cdn.merchantai.io/widget.js" data-agent-id="YOUR_AGENT_ID" async></script>
Replace YOUR_AGENT_ID with the ID shown in your dashboard. No other changes to your site are needed.
5

Review and improve

Once your agent is live, the Analytics dashboard starts collecting data immediately. Check it regularly to find:
  • Missed answers — questions visitors asked that the agent couldn’t answer confidently, flagged for your review.
  • Source gaps — pages or topics that are missing from your knowledge base and causing low-confidence responses.
  • Handover queue — conversations that were escalated to your team, with full transcript and contact details attached.
Use these signals to add content to your knowledge base, tighten guardrails, or adjust your agent’s tone until the quality meets your standard.
Your 14-day free trial requires no credit card and gives you full access to every feature. If you decide MerchantAI isn’t right for you, cancellation is one click and nothing carries over without your confirmation.

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What’s next?

Knowledge base

Learn how to add pages, upload files, and manage the content your agent learns from.

Shopify integration

Step-by-step guide for connecting your Shopify store and configuring catalog-aware workflows.

Agent configuration

Customize your agent’s name, persona, widget appearance, and escalation behavior.

Guardrails

Set confidence thresholds, topic blocklists, and handover rules to keep answers accurate and safe.