Let AI assistants and agents work with your store

There are three kinds of AI around your store: the assistant on your store that answers shoppers, an AI agent of your own that helps run it, and shoppers’ AI assistants that buy from it.

Ask the shop, for your shoppers

Ask the shop is your store’s own assistant. It answers shoppers from your product details, stock, delivery and policies. It says it’s an AI, answers only from what’s on file and shows where each answer came from. It never makes up a discount, a delivery date or a refund, and when it isn’t sure, or a shopper asks for a person, it passes the conversation to your team.

Who can do this: You need to be an owner or admin to do this.

Choose Store settings, then Assistant. Turn Ask the shop on your store on or off, and choose Where it appears: every page, or product pages only. When it’s off, shoppers see your contact details instead.

Your store inbox

Inbox holds every conversation shoppers have with your store: in the chat on your site, by email to your store, and replies to order emails. Conversations that need a person come first under Needs you; the rest are With the assistant or under All.

1. Choose Inbox, then a conversation. It shows every message and which order it’s about.
2. Write under Your reply and choose Send. A chat reply appears in the chat on your site; an email reply goes to the shopper in your store’s name, and their answer comes back here.
3. Choose Give back to the assistant to let it carry on, or Close when it’s done.

When the assistant answers a conversation, it reads the whole thread and replies in your store’s name. A reply may state only figures from the conversation’s orders, returns and your returns policy, may promise a refund or replacement only when your returns policy decided one, and may link only to your store. Anything else is refused before it’s sent. The first reply of each kind waits for your approval under Approvals. A complaint, a legal threat, a chargeback, abuse, a safety issue, a question it can’t answer from your store’s facts, or a shopper asking for a person is handed to your team under Needs you, with the reason.

The assistant can also put things right, each as your returns policy and your approvals allow:

• Start a return for the shopper, only when your returns policy allows every item they asked about. The shopper gets the return’s next steps by email. If any item isn’t allowed, the conversation comes to you with your policy’s own words.
• Give store credit as goodwill when an order arrived late: a gift card of your store’s, sent to the shopper by email, once per conversation. Up to your store’s credit limit (£10 or $10 unless you change it) the assistant can give it on its own once you’ve let it; above the limit it always asks you.
• Refund an order: refunds whole items to the card the shopper paid with, with nothing coming back and nothing restocked. Tuppence’s fee isn’t returned. A person always approves a refund, with a fresh second factor.

A cancellation of an order that hasn’t been sent always waits for your approval.

Your own AI agent

An AI agent you use, such as Claude, can work on your store through Tuppence’s MCP server: find orders, edit products and pages, buy labels, approve returns and more.

1. Choose Developers, then API keys, and create a Restricted key with only what the agent needs, such as reading orders or writing products.
2. Add Tuppence’s MCP server to your agent with that key. The page gives you the command for Claude Code.

Your agent can work the inbox too: list conversations, answer a shopper as your store, close a conversation or give it back to the assistant. Through the Tuppence Assistant, every answer to a shopper waits for your approval.

The agent sees only the tools its key allows, and acts as that key: what it changes is listed under Changes, where you can undo it. Some things are never an agent’s: refunds and cancellations, sending purchase orders, your domains, your business’s legal details, how your store takes payment, going live and deleting the site. A test key works only on your test store.

Shoppers’ AI assistants

Shoppers increasingly ask an AI assistant to find and buy things. Your store is ready for them from the start: an assistant can search your products, check stock and delivery, read your policies and build a basket. Usually it hands the shopper a link to pay in one tap. An assistant that is verified and holds the shopper’s permission to pay can complete a small order itself.

Some things always go back to the shopper: age-restricted items, subscriptions, bookings, gift cards and drops. An assistant that fails to pay several times in a row is paused for a day.

Your own shop front

Building your own shop front on Tuppence? Under Store settings, in Developers, list the websites allowed to call your store from a browser under Allowed origins and choose Save origins. The developer docs explain the rest.