Shoppers, lifecycle & VIP
Zubby builds a unified profile for every shopper who interacts with your store - whether they bought, asked a question, or just browsed. The dashboard surface is Dashboard → Shoppers. This page covers what’s in a profile, how identity stitching works, and how lifecycle and VIP tiers feed back into the AI’s behavior.
What’s in a profile
A profile can combine two sources:
- Commerce data - Shopify or WooCommerce customer and order records, or order data pushed by a custom integration. The public custom API does not provide a separate customer-ingest endpoint.
- Zubby interactions - conversations, captured leads, widget visits, and page-view signals.
The shopper detail page shows lifetime spend, average order value, order and conversation counts, recent conversations and orders, loyalty balance, and editable birthday/anniversary dates (which power the celebration journey triggers).
Working the Shoppers list
- Open
Dashboard → Shoppers. The KPI cards at the top - All, VIPs, Customers, Leads, Identified, Anonymous - are clickable lifecycle-stage filters, so the numbers double as navigation. - Search by email, name, or phone, or arrive pre-filtered from a segment’s View shoppers link. Filtering first keeps you acting on a cohort instead of scrolling a haystack.
- Check the churn watchlist - shoppers with a high churn-risk score, recomputed daily from recency and engagement signals. These are the profiles to review before choosing a follow-up. The churn prediction view requires Pro.
- Click a row for the full profile: chat history, order history, and the context that explains why the AI treats this shopper the way it does.
Identity stitching
A single human can have multiple identifiers: an anonymous widget session, an email typed into chat, a phone number, a platform customer ID. Zubby keeps an alias table per profile - session ID, email, and phone all resolve to the same shopper - so the AI talks to “the person” rather than “this session”.
Stitching signals:
- Commerce record match through checkout email or a platform customer ID.
- Logged-in identity passthrough - on Shopify and WooCommerce, a signed token identifies the logged-in customer to the widget, so the AI can greet them by name and answer order questions without asking for an order number.
- Custom-store identity begins with widget sessions and information the shopper supplies. Do not assume a custom embed has the managed connectors’ signed logged-in identity bridge. Developers can configure the signed custom identity flow; a typed email alone is not verified identity.
- Email or phone captured in chat, linked to the session alias.
Lifecycle stages
Five stages map every shopper. Transitions are event-driven - an identifier or an order moves the stage the moment it happens - and the AI sees the current stage on every conversation.
| Stage | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Anonymous | Widget session with no identifier yet. |
| Identified | An email or platform identity is known. |
| Lead | Captured through a lead form or in-chat capture. |
| Customer | Has placed at least one order. |
| VIP | Crossed your VIP tier thresholds. |
VIP tiers
VIP is a separate, per-store concept layered on top of lifecycle. Each tier has a rank, a minimum lifetime spend, and a minimum order count; a shopper holds the highest tier whose thresholds they meet. VIP status flows into the AI’s conversation context alongside the loyalty balance, and the widget’s audience rules can restrict an experience to VIPs only.
VIP vs. loyalty tiers
Segments
Segments are live queries over shopper profiles - no membership table, no refresh interval; a shopper enters and leaves a segment the time the query is run against the stored profile. Some profile signals, including VIP evaluation, are recalculated by scheduled jobs. The built-in catalog and the custom filter builder are covered in Segments.
Cohorts
Analytics → Cohorts shows a monthly retention grid: rows are the month a shopper first ordered, columns are months 0–5 since then, and each cell is the share of that cohort who ordered again in that month - twelve months of history at a glance.
Privacy
Shopper profiles inherit your store’s retention policy. GDPR and CCPA requests propagate through Zubby via the standard Shopify customers/redact and shop/redact webhooks (or the equivalent WooCommerce calls). See Security & privacy.
API
Lead and conversation summaries can be read through the REST API - useful for syncing captured leads or conversation outcomes into your CRM or warehouse. The documented orders endpoint ingests orders; it is not a general order-read API.