Shopper is your brand’s always-on* AI shopping assistant that helps you engage your customers in a more personalized and dynamic way through SMS. With Shopper, you can target subscribers who haven’t converted and help them shop, create an amazing, on-brand customer experience for every subscriber, and gain valuable customer insights to improve your marketing.
Watch the short video below for an overview of Shopper:
In this article, we’ll walk you through how to demo and activate your store’s Shopper. We’ll also answer some frequently asked questions and coach you through how to review your Shopper results.
Before Getting Started
Set Up Brand Center
Please ensure your Brand Center is thoroughly filled out, including the Persona which will become your Shopper’s persona.
For Shopper, it’s important to add your store’s FAQ pages to Brand Center:
- From the Links & Documents section in Brand Center, select the Add Link button in the upper-right corner.
- Paste the URL for your FAQ page, Help Center, and other educational landing pages you have. For example, a product care guide.
- For Content Type, select FAQ for all of the URLs described in step 2.
- Toggle the Use for AI bar so that it shows green and a check mark.
- Select Save.
How to Make Knowledge Base Articles Discoverable to Shopper
At this time, Shopper cannot be trained by ingesting content hosted on some third-party subdomains (such as help desk platforms like Zendesk or Gorgias).
If your FAQs are primarily hosted on a subdomain Postscript cannot access, we recommend publishing common questions & key details—like shipping policies, return windows, or sizing guidance—on a Shopify-hosted FAQ page. This helps Shopper provide more accurate, helpful responses to your customers.
Follow these steps to create an FAQ page on Shopify that you can link in Brand Center. We’ll discuss how to add your Shopify-hosted FAQ page to Brand Center in the Activating Shopper section.
Demo Shopper Before Activating
Postscript allows you to demo your Shopper before activating it for all of your subscribers to engage with. By demoing Shopper, you can ensure it’s appropriately reflecting your brand voice and information.
To demo your shopper, scan the unique QR code in your Shopper settings page or text SHOPPERDEMO to your shop number.
If Shopper isn’t emulating your brand voice, head to your Brand Center to tweak your settings.
Activating Shopper
- From your Postscript Dashboard, select Brand Center. Then select Shopper.
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Offer Code
- In the Offer Code card, create an offer in Shopify then add the offer code in your Shopper settings so Shopper can share it with subscribers when appropriate. For easier tracking, we recommend a code that’s unique to your Shopper experience (e.g., if your persona is Andrew, consider making your offer ANDREW10).
- Next, in the Offer Details field, enter offer terms and constraints so Shopper can properly explain offer usage details to subscribers.
- Within the FAQ card, select the View all FAQ Links button to be routed to the Links & Documents section of your Brand Center. Here, you have an opportunity to add links or documents to inform your Shopper. Be sure to mark these content types as FAQ and toggle on the Use for AI bar.
- Under Product Catalog, enter product tags for products that you want to exclude from Shopper’s knowledge base.
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Support details
- Your support email will be prepopulated– ensure it’s correct.
- Enter a support message. Shopper will reference this when creating its own message for subscribers needing help from your support team.
- Fallback message. Set your fallback message for subscribers when Shopper can’t respond right away.
- Select Save Changes.
- Next, select the Outreach Messages tab in your Shopper settings.
- Select the review buttons under each section. Deselect any messages that do not sound like your brand (Tip: if none of the messages match your brand voice, head to your Brand Center and tweak your settings).
- Select the Activate Shopper button in the upper-right corner. By activating Shopper, two new flows in your account are created based on the outreach messages you reviewed above. These flows are located in your Automation Flows and are labeled:
- Shopper | Link Clicked Approved Outreach
- Shopper | Welcome Series Approved Outreach
- Shopper is now live in your account and ready to respond to all subscriber inbound messages in under 1 minute.
Activating Shopper pauses customer support routing, giving it the space to do what it does best—engage with your subscribers, reduce support tickets, and drive conversions. For conversations that require your Support team’s expertise (e.g., order details, exchanges, returns, or questions outside Shopper’s scope), Shopper will direct the subscriber to your support team.
By letting Shopper be the first point of contact for SMS conversations, you can significantly reduce the workload for your CX team all while providing a great experience to your subscribers.
What’s Next?
With Shopper activated, you can engage subscribers at key moments in the customer journey to help them shop. The more you proactively engage with your subscribers, the more conversations you’ll create– and conversations drive higher conversions. We recommend starting with the following playbook:
Creating 2-3 additional automation flows, such as:
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Welcome Series: Introduce your Shopper persona in the 2nd or 3rd message to let subscribers know that you're available to chat and ask them an open-ended question.
- Example copy: Hey! This is [Shopper Name] from the [Brand Name] team 👋 I'm a product consultant, and here to help you shop. Tell me a little bit about your skin. What’s your main goal or concern that you’d like to tackle?
- Abandoned Cart / Browse Abandonment
- No purchase first 30 days
Sending 2-4 conversational campaigns per month:
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Campaign follow up flow: When sending your regular marketing campaigns, add a 24 hour delay and then an event split, targeting subscribers who clicked on the campaign link but didn’t buy.
- Example copy: Hey! I'm [Shopper Name], did you have any questions about [Campaign]? I'm happy to help :) Or if this isn't the right one for you, I can help you find a better option.
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Gift recommendation
- Example copy: Hey! This is [Shopper Name], [Holiday] is coming up and I'm here to help you find the perfect gift, whether you're shopping for a special someone or yourself 😄Tell me a little bit about who you're shopping for, and I can help you find the perfect gift! Are they a whiskey drinker, craft beer lover, musician, or military person? [replace with brand-relevant options]
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Sale reminder
- Example copy: Hey, it's [Persona Name] from [Brand]. We don't run sales often, but today? You're in luck. What's something you've been eyeing? If it's in stock, I'll help you lock it in before the deal's gone!
The options are endless and you can get as creative as you want with how you use Shopper.
Reviewing Results
- To view Shopper data, select Data & Insights on the left-side navigation panel. Then select Shopper.
- Conversational insights are also available under the Shopper tab within Data & Insights.
- All of your SMS conversations will be found under the Conversations tab within Messaging (Tip: When you drill into individual conversations, you can “Thumbs Up” or “Thumbs Down” Shopper replies to continue training the model).
FAQs
How can I improve Shopper messages?
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Refine Your Brand Center.
- Add a persona to help inspire how Shopper identifies to subscribers.
- Double check that your Industry type is correct.
- Use the Brand Summary and Target Customer Base sections to share key details like demographics, interests, and shopping habits to help shape messaging that reflects your brand’s voice.
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Check the Accuracy of Your Website.
- Make sure the product catalogue on your website reflects the most up-to-date product titles and descriptions. (Note: Shopper does not currently pull in meta fields content.)
- Review the FAQs that are linked via the Brand Center.
- Hide specific products from Shopper via the Product Catalogue section in Shopper settings.
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Provide Feedback.
- To help Postscript improve Shopper, be sure to send your Postscript representative screenshots, ideas, or AI-generated message feedback.
Why do I have to include a discount code for Shopper, and how will Shopper use it?
- Through our experience running SMS Sales, we’ve learned that a higher-tier discount (ex 15% compared to your 10% welcome discount) is a very effective tool to help convert more price-sensitive subscribers. Shopper is trained to use coupons wisely. It will only bring up the discount code it has available based on queues from the conversation. Ex, if the subscriber explicitly says that “the price is too high” or “I’m waiting for a sale”. If you are trying to limit coupon codes, consider adding free shipping, Fondue Cashback, or free gift offer in place of a discount.
What if I need more support creating and a conversational SMS strategy?
- Our Postscript Plus team can help you create and manage your conversational SMS strategy, ensuring that you’re driving as much revenue with Shopper as possible with very little work on your side.
Does messaging back and forth with my Shopper “train” the AI model?
- Texting with Shopper is a great way to test the experience, but it does not teach or train Shopper. Shopper learns directly from your brand center and product catalog.
How does Shopper work with my customer support team?
- While Shopper can significantly increase the number of conversations you are having over SMS, it actually results in less work for your CX team. On average, Shopper decreases the amount of SMS tickets being routed to CX by 85% while increasing interactions with customers by 68%. This is because you can train your Shopper to answer the most common questions that your customers ask, and only to escalate what is necessary to your CX team, such as questions about refunds.
What is the attribution model for Shopper?
- Shopper uses the same attribution model as what you choose for your overall SMS marketing program, under your Tracking settings. By default, its last message before the order, 24 hour view, 7 day click.
Is Shopper available internationally?
- For now, Shopper is only available for subscribers in the US and Canada.
*How does Shopper handle quiet hours?
- Shopper is always on and ready to engage with subscribers—but compliance comes first. The federal TCPA and most state mini-TCPA laws recognize that consumers who provide prior consent to receive marketing SMS are not able to enforce quiet hours. Shopper only responds to subscribers who send in a message. Except as noted below, if a subscriber responds during quiet hours, Shopper will respond once waking hours resume.
- Maryland’s mini-TCPA establishes quiet hours from 8 PM to 8 AM ET and does not expressly recognize prior consent as an exception. Therefore, it could be argued to restrict even conversational messages during that window. Out of an abundance of caution, Shopper automatically pauses replies to Maryland area codes during those hours.
Will Shopper be available on RCS?
- Postscript is actively working with merchants to gain channel insights and inform our approach to RCS. We anticipate that RCS functionality will become available to a wider audience later in 2025. At that time, we plan to activate Shopper on RCS. In the meantime, please let us know if you are interested as we are seeking out merchants for our Alpha and Beta programs for RCS.
Get Support
Have questions? Please feel free to reach out to our wonderful Support team at support@postscript.io or via live chat. You can also submit a support request here!
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