Shopping Assistant
The Shopping Assistant is a chat panel grounded in your real catalog. When you turn it on, shoppers get a launcher that opens a chat panel; the assistant answers from your real catalog and shows live product cards, with add-to-cart on supported stores.
What the assistant can do
The assistant's core job is shopping: it finds products, browses your categories, opens product details, and manages the cart. Those core actions are what make it usable right away, and they are the ones that gate going live.
On top of the core, the assistant can turn on extra capabilities only when your store supports them — poneva verifies each one against your store during discovery, so a capability appears only after it has been proven for you:
- Customer reviews — read ratings, review summaries, and recent shopper feedback for a product, so the assistant can answer "is this any good?" with your real reviews.
- Markets and locale — show the markets, currencies, and locales your storefront offers and switch the active one for a shopper, for stores that sell across regions.
- Related products — suggest recommended or related products from a merchandised rail (for example a "related products" strip), so shoppers discover more of your catalog.
- Store categories — list your product categories and their section links, so the assistant can walk a shopper through how your store is organized.
- Knowledge base — answer questions from a knowledge base you upload — content that isn't on the storefront. This capability appears only after you add a corpus.
- FAQ and help pages — answer support questions from your own published FAQ and help pages, fetched live, including sizing and fit guidance, returns, shipping, and other public policy questions. When your help content uses different wording or another language, the assistant can use your store guidance to match the shopper's question to the right published page, answer from that page before showing products, and include a source link when it points shoppers to the article. This capability appears only after those pages are captured.
You don't configure these by hand. Discovery decides per store which capabilities are proven, and the dashboard shows the result.
Seeing what's verified
The dashboard Integration → Install & health screen has a Capability breakdown panel. It groups capabilities into the core shopping actions and the optional ones, and each capability shows an honest status — Ready now, Checking now, or Not verified yet — so partial discovery is obvious and you can see exactly what shoppers can do today. Building on these surfaces? The integration contract documents the same signals for engineers.
Settings
Greeting, example prompts, logo, theme, placement, and the on/off switch are all dashboard settings; changes apply on the next page load with no redeploy.
Turning it on and off
There is a single on/off switch for the assistant in two places: the dashboard Overview ("What's live" card) and the Shopping Assistant header. Both flip the same setting and both show an honest Live / Off status. Switching it off hides the assistant from every shopper immediately — your site shows no assistant until you turn it back on. The change applies on the next page load with no redeploy.
Install & placement
The embed snippet and placement options live under Shopping Assistant → Settings → Install & placement. The same snippet from the quick start powers the assistant — there is nothing extra to install.
Preview before going live
Once your store is ready, opening any page on your site with ?skaii_preview=1 appended
to the URL shows you the widget even while it is still switched off for shoppers. Until
you switch it on, shoppers see your unchanged site.
Live support is a separate switch
Human-handoff support chat — Agent Support — is its own capability. With the Shopping Assistant on, shoppers reach support through the assistant. With the Shopping Assistant off but Agent Support enabled, shoppers still get a standalone support launcher, so support never depends on the assistant being switched on.