AI setup & behavior

The AI Setup tab is where you decide how the agent sounds and behaves on your storefront. Find it under Settings → Behavior → AI Setup, or go to /app/<storeId>/settings/ai. The page has six cards: Brand voice, AI conversion flows, AI order & money actions, Returns & exchanges, Incrementality holdout, and Margin guard for AI discounts. The underlying AI service is managed by Zubby - there is no merchant model picker.

What merchants control

Merchants control the agent’s voice, approved knowledge, conversion behavior, handoff destination, and permitted order actions. Zubby manages the underlying AI service. If replies are unavailable, use the support team or contact support instead of looking for service credentials in the store workspace.

Brand voice (inline)

This card shapes how the AI sounds without leaving the AI Setup page. It has four controls plus a live preview:

• Tone profile - Professional, Friendly, Technical, or Luxury. Defaults to Friendly.
• Greeting style - Standard, Concierge, or Fast and direct.
• Emoji usage - No emoji, Light emoji, or Playful emoji.
• Custom instructions - a free-text box for specific guidance, e.g. “keep replies short, reassure about shipping speed, avoid medical claims, and push premium bundles before entry products.”

The dark preview panel on the right shows your configured agent name and welcome message and a sample exchange so you can sanity-check the tone before saving. Click Save AI setup to persist.

AI conversion flows

The second card is a set of toggles plus two dropdowns and an A/B test. Each toggle turns a capability on or off for your store:

• Page-aware context - let the AI adapt to product, cart, collection, and support page context.
• Variant-aware recommendations - use the selected variant, pricing, and stock signals in recommendations.
• Guided selling - allow the widget to run quiz-like product finder flows.
• Lead capture - capture the shopper’s email when intent is strong but the sale isn’t complete.
• Human handoff - offer support or sales escalation when AI confidence is low.
• Bundle recommendations - promote bundles, pairings, and attachments when relevant.
• Smart discounts - allow the AI to use merchant-approved incentive playbooks.
• Browse abandonment - track high-intent browsing for later follow-up capture and recovery.
• Margin-aware recommendations - among similarly-relevant products, favor higher-margin and overstocked ones and slightly demote frequently returned ones (Growth and above; needs product cost data). See Recommendations.

The two dropdowns below the toggles fine-tune behavior:

• Guided selling style - Product finder, Concierge, or Diagnostic.
• Handoff destination - Support, Sales, or Concierge. Where escalations route.

Finally, the Opening message A/B test block lets you split visitors across two greetings (Opening message A and Opening message B) to improve open-to-conversion performance. Enable the switch, fill both messages, and click Save conversion flows.

AI order & money actions

The third card decides whether the AI can act on a shopper’s own order or subscription itself, or must hand off to your team. Cancel, modify, refund, and subscription changes are off by default; leave them off to keep money handling fully in human hands. Edit shipping address is the one exception: it is on by default, because it was already available before these switches existed and moves no money. Turn it off if you want a human to handle every address change.

• Cancel orders - on Shopify, request cancellation of an eligible unfulfilled order with refund. Shopify may process the cancellation asynchronously; accepted is not the same as completed.
• Modify orders - on Shopify, reduce quantities or remove items on an eligible unfulfilled order. Adding items or increasing quantity needs a human because it can require new payment.
• Process refunds - on Shopify, request a full refund against supported captured payments on the shopper’s own order. Partial or line-item refunds need a human. Enable only after testing your payment and permission setup in a test store.
• Edit shipping address (on by default) - the AI can update the shipping address on an unfulfilled order.
• Manage subscriptions (ReCharge) - the AI can skip the shopper’s next order, change the next charge date, pause, restart, or cancel their own ReCharge subscription. See Subscriptions in chat below.

Writes require verified shopper identity, ownership of the order, eligibility, and confirmation of the previewed change in a later shopper turn. Cancel and modify require an unshipped order. WooCommerce cancel, edit, and refund requests become high-priority tickets even if their toggles are enabled; shipping-address changes can write through the plugin. Unsupported platforms and failed writes fall back to a ticket. When a toggle is off the AI never performs that action; it routes the request to a human via a support ticket. Persist with Save order actions.

Platform action matrix

These are implemented paths, conditional on platform permissions, credentials, identity verification, and order eligibility. They are not confirmation that a production store has been tested. Leave money actions off when your team must review amounts or exceptions. Address changes move no money but still affect fulfillment: switch them off if your warehouse requires manual approval.

Verify an order-action change

1. Use a test store, an owned unfulfilled test order, and a verified test shopper.
2. Open Settings → Behavior → AI Setup, change one switch, and select Save order actions.
3. Ask for the change. Check the exact order and proposed change in the preview; verify that declining makes no change.
4. In a separately authorized test, confirm the preview. Inspect the platform order, the conversation tool result, and any ticket. A pending cancellation must not be reported as a completed refund.
5. Test an ineligible order and an unverified shopper. Expect rejection or handoff, not a successful write.

Subscriptions in chat (ReCharge)

Needs ReCharge connected: open Settings → Integrations in the dashboard, choose ReCharge subscriptions, and paste a ReCharge API token. Once it is, signed-in (verified) shoppers can ask what they are subscribed to, how often it repeats, and when the next order is charged. Viewing is always available with ReCharge connected; the Manage subscriptions switch only controls changes. With it on, the AI can:

• Skip the next order.
• Change the next charge date to a date the shopper picks.
• Pause for 1 to 26 weeks. ReCharge has no separate paused state, so a pause moves the next charge date later and the subscription resumes on its own on that date.
• Resume a cancelled subscription.
• Cancel. Before cancelling, the AI offers a skip or a pause once; it cancels only if the shopper still wants to.

Every change is previewed first and happens only after the shopper confirms it, and every applied change is written to the audit log. If ReCharge is unavailable or rejects Zubby’s access, nothing changes and the AI opens a high-priority support ticket for your team. When the switch is off, the AI routes change requests to a human instead.

Returns & exchanges

Lets the AI run a guided, exchange-first return flow in chat. It checks eligibility against your return window and exclusions, offers an exchange or store credit before a refund when that fits the shopper’s reason, and always honors a shopper who just wants a refund. Requests land as return requests for your team; the AI never moves money in this flow.

Incrementality holdout

Holds a fixed share of visitors back from the assistant entirely (no bubble, no proactive message, no AI search) so you can compare their order rate with everyone else’s. It is off by default, and the same visitor key stays in the same group while it persists. This suppresses assistant surfaces, not every storefront feature: standalone popups, promo bars, recommendations, product Q&A, and scarcity badges remain. The current order-to-assignment join supports a lift result for Shopify. WooCommerce can suppress and count visitors but does not produce a valid order-conversion lift result from its cart-token path. Treat displayed comparisons as directional, not statistical proof or recovery-email lift. See Analytics and Profit & product costs.

Margin guard for AI discounts

Every discount the assistant, a popup, or a proactive message offers is checked against your product costs on Zubby’s servers before a shopper sees it. If an offer would take an order below your floor, it is lowered to the deepest safe amount or not offered at all. Shoppers never see your costs or the reason. The guard is on by default on every plan with a 0% floor, which checks the floor when product costs are known. When costs are missing, a percentage cap cannot establish profitability. Add costs or choose to block offers for those products.

• Minimum margin after discount - raise the floor (up to 90%) to keep more margin than break-even.
• Free-shipping cost - what a free-shipping offer costs you; left blank, Zubby estimates it from your synced shipping rates.
• When a product has no cost - keep the percentage cap from your offer rules, or offer no discount at all. Fill in costs to avoid relying on either; see Profit & product costs.
• Category floors (Growth and above) - a different floor for a product type or collection, for example 0% on clearance and 15% on electronics. The strictest match wins.

The card previews your top products with the deepest discount the guard allows, and counts how many offers it lowered or withheld in the last 30 days. Turning the guard off returns to percentage-only caps from your offer rules.

Step-by-step: configure the agent

1. Open Settings → Behavior → AI Setup in the dashboard.
2. In Brand voice, pick a tone profile, greeting style, and emoji usage, add any custom instructions, sanity-check the preview panel, and click Save AI setup.
3. In AI conversion flows, toggle the capabilities you want, set the guided-selling style and handoff destination, then click Save conversion flows.
4. Optionally enable the Opening message A/B test and fill both greetings before saving.
5. Review AI order & money actions - only enable what you are comfortable automating (address changes are on by default), then click Save order actions.

Related

For the full request pipeline behind these settings - retrieval, tools, and guardrails - read How the AI works. To author the agent’s do-not-say rules and persona, see System prompt. Handoff behavior is covered in Human handoff.