Onboard a WooCommerce client

You run all of it yourself, start to finish. Nothing in this guide waits on ShopAssist.

Before your first client

ShopAssist creates your agency and makes one person an owner. You cannot create an agency yourself. That owner signs in with a magic link and lands in the partner portal.

Invite the rest of your team from the Team page. An owner can add clients and start setup runs. A member can review and edit everything else. Invitation links expire after 48 hours.

One person belongs to one agency. An address that already sits in another agency must be released there first.

1. Make sure that the store qualifies

• WordPress 6.0 or newer, PHP 7.4 or newer.
• WooCommerce installed and active.
• The store is public over HTTPS.
• No security plugin blocks /wp-json/wc/v3/products.

2. Add the client in the portal

Owners only.

1. Open Clients and select Add client.
2. Enter the shop domain, for example store.com.
3. Enter a name, or leave it empty to use the domain.
4. Set the platform to WooCommerce and select Add client.

Add as many clients as you need. The one refusal is a domain another agency already implements. The name becomes the shop's internal slug, so pick it once and keep it.

3. Install the plugin

Do this in the client's WordPress admin.

1. Download shopassist.zip from the link ShopAssist gave you.
2. Open Plugins → Add New → Upload Plugin.
3. Choose the zip, select Install Now, then Activate.
4. Open WooCommerce → ShopAssist.

Later plugin updates arrive on their own, on the Plugins screen, so you never upload the zip twice.

4. Connect the store

The panel at the top reads Connect your store. Use the first button. The plugin creates a read-only WooCommerce REST key by itself and sends it to ShopAssist. Nobody copies a key by hand.

1. Select Connect to ShopAssist.
2. Sign in with your own agency address when the page asks.
3. Land back on WooCommerce → ShopAssist.

Signing in with an agency address claims the store for your agency. It creates no merchant login and gives you no merchant session. You reach the client through the portal, the same as every other client.

5. Confirm the connection

The plugin panel now reads Pending activation. That is correct here, and it is not something to fix.

The panel re-checks itself every time the settings page loads, so it flips on its own once the shop is activated.

Back in the portal, the client badge moves from created to Connected.

If the badge stays on created, the credentials never arrived. Repeat step 4 and read the error on the plugin panel. Connected means the credentials arrived. It does not mean the widget is serving.

6. Generate the assistant

Owners only.

1. Open the client card and select Assistant setup.
2. Select Generate assistant.
3. Watch the Progress tab until the run finishes.

Do this after step 5, never before. The run reads the product catalog using the store credentials, so a run started earlier produces a thin, half-empty result.

A run takes a few minutes and the progress is stored, so you can close the tab and come back. One run at a time per shop, and ten runs per day across your agency.

7. Correct what the assistant knows

1. Open the Knowledge tab.
2. Read the shipping, returns and sizing sections against the merchant's real policy.
3. Correct anything wrong and select Save.
4. Select Regenerate prompt at the top of the page.

Most wrong answers start here rather than in the prompt. Fix the fact first, and only then reach for step 8.

8. Adjust how the assistant behaves

1. Open the Prompt tab.
2. Edit the text, or ask the side-panel assistant to make the change.
3. Save.

Every save is a draft, and the badge unpublished draft confirms it landed. Drafts change nothing for shoppers until you publish in step 12, so edit freely.

9. Set the widget

Open dashboard is greyed out while the shop is pending, because a pending shop has no merchant dashboard yet. Select Enable test mode on the client card to unlock it. Test mode serves test traffic only, so shoppers still see nothing.

1. Select Open dashboard on the client card.
2. Open the Testing Tool page.
3. Set the color, button position, greeting and tooltip.
4. Write three suggested questions, taken from the merchant's real inbox.
5. Set the language, and limit the pages if the widget belongs on only some.
6. Save.

Your dashboard session lasts one hour. Open it again when it runs out. Back in WordPress, make sure that Enable Widget is on.

10. Give the merchant their dashboard login

1. Open Clients and select Dashboard access on the client card.
2. Enter the merchant's email address and select Add.

Connecting the store does not create a merchant login, so this is a deliberate step. They sign in with a link sent to that address, once the shop is active. Add as many addresses as the merchant needs, and remove one at any time.

11. Test the assistant

1. Open the Testing Tool page and turn on test mode.
2. Ask the ten questions this merchant's customers ask most.
3. Make sure that it answers in the shop's language.
4. Make sure that the products it shows are real and in stock.
5. Make sure that shipping and returns answers match the real policy.
6. Ask one question the shop cannot answer, and make sure that it refuses.

Test mode records nothing as real traffic and changes no analytics. Fix a wrong fact in Knowledge and regenerate. Fix tone or behavior in Prompt.

12. Publish and go live

Owners only. These are the two actions that reach real shoppers.

1. On the Prompt tab, select Publish. The draft becomes what customers get.
2. On the client card, select Go live and confirm.

13. Confirm the result

Open the storefront in a private window and make sure that the floating chat button appears. Open a product page and make sure that the question pills appear.

Reading the plugin panel

The heading on that panel always follows the shop's real status on our side. Read it before you debug anything else.

Deactivating the plugin is the disconnect. There is no separate disconnect button on a connected store.

When something goes wrong

Screenshots on this page come from a live demo store. Your client's screens carry their own name and domain.