Set up your first assistant
Onboarding is two steps, your organization and then your storefront address. It then reads your store, preconfigures an assistant you review, and ends in the Playground where you put it live.
The first time you sign in, the dashboard sends you to /onboarding. It has two steps. First you name your organization. Then you give your storefront address, and everything else is derived from that address: your site, your assistant, its language, its name, and (when we can confirm it) a catalog connection.
You end the flow in the Playground, with your assistant selected and the Go live confirmation open. The assistant answers shoppers only once a member confirms Go live and the tag is installed on your storefront. Until then it answers only in your Playground.
Walk through it
Create your organization
/onboarding opens on Create your organization. Type a name and tick the box to accept the terms of service and the privacy policy on behalf of your company. Both open in a new tab. Click Create organization.
This step creates the organization and makes you its admin. It creates nothing else: no site and no assistant yet. The name is whatever you type, and you can change it later from Organization profile.
Were you invited to a team?
If an invitation to an existing organization is waiting for your email address, the screen lists it above the form as Organization invited you. Click Join to enter that organization instead of creating a new one. An invitation that has expired, was revoked, or was sent to another address can't be accepted: the screen says "We couldn't accept that invitation. It may have expired." The screen also suggests asking your colleagues for an invitation if they already use iAdvize.
Enter your storefront address
You land on Where does your assistant live?. Type your store's public address and click Continue. A bare domain is fine: mystore.com becomes https://mystore.com.
We fetch that page once, right there, to check it answers and to read a few things out of its <head>. That takes a few seconds; the button reads "Reading your store…" while it runs.
The address has to be publicly reachable over HTTPS. If it isn't (a typo, a domain that doesn't resolve, an HTTP-only address, or a host that points at a private/internal network), you stay on the form with an error and nothing is created. Fix the address and submit again.
A 403 still counts
Any HTTP response counts as reachable, including a 403 or a bot-protection challenge from a CDN. Those prove the domain exists and answers. Only a transport failure (no DNS, refused connection, timeout, redirect loop) blocks you. If the response carries no readable HTML, we fall back to your domain name and English.
Redirects are followed (up to five hops) and the final address is the one your site is created with, so typing a non-canonical host still lands you on the address your storefront really serves from.
Let it read your store
Submitting takes you to a progress screen that lists what we're doing:
- Reached your-host: done as soon as you land here.
- Shopify confirmed or No catalog detected yet: see Catalog connection below.
- Starting the analysis of your sitemaps and pages: AISA launches the sitemap import into Pages. The line turns to Analysis of your sitemaps and pages started as soon as the import is launched, with the note that it keeps running in the background and that results appear in Pages. It does not wait for the import to finish, and a site with no sitemap still shows it as started. If the import could not start or ended as failed, the line reads "We couldn't analyze your pages. You can start it from Pages." with a neutral icon, not an error, and the analysis carries on.
- Researching your brand online: a broad web search for your categories, your reputation, and your tone of voice on social media and in the press.
- Learning what your store sells: a fresh search limited to your own domain, to see what your home, about, and category pages say you sell. It does not read your pages one by one: that is what the sitemaps and pages line above starts.
- Writing your assistant's profile: turning that into the text the assistant is grounded on.
The screen refreshes itself every couple of seconds and says it usually takes about half a minute.
Alongside the analysis, AISA starts importing your sitemap into Pages, in the background. It lists your pages as Not read and reads none of them. It has its own line on this screen (see above) and never holds up the analysis: if no sitemap is found, the analysis finishes as usual. The line follows the first import recorded for the site. If a member already started an import (from Pages, the API or MCP), the line is not shown.
You can close the tab
The analysis runs on our side as a durable background job, not in your
browser. Closing the tab, losing your connection, or navigating away does not
cancel it. When it finishes we email whoever started it (in that person's
dashboard language), with a link straight back to the review screen. Going
back to /onboarding at any point also resumes you wherever the flow
currently stands. If you have not created an organization yet you start at the
first step, and once you have one you are sent on to the site step.
Review what we generated
When the analysis finishes you land on Here's your assistant: every derived value, shown, and editable if your role grants the permission that row's save requires:
| Row | What it is |
|---|---|
| Site name | Editable. |
| Assistant name | Editable. Sets the name shoppers will see once you go live. |
| Language | The language detected on your storefront. Change it in Site settings → Website. |
| What you sell | Generated. Editable. |
| Tone of voice | Generated. Editable. |
| Catalog | Connected or not; read-only here. |
Click Edit on a row, change it, click Save. There's no draft and no "approve everything" step: each save lands on the real record immediately, so leaving the screen loses nothing and coming back shows what you saved.
The URL itself isn't editable here, because everything on the screen was derived from it. If you typed the wrong address, correct the rows that are wrong, or change the site's URL afterwards from its Site settings → Website tab.
Editing here needs a permission too
Site name, What you sell, and Tone of voice need the Sites: Edit permission; Assistant name needs Agents: Edit instead, because saving it saves the agent's configuration rather than editing the site. Without the row's permission, its Edit button doesn't appear at all (you see the current value as plain text). See Permissions.
Renaming the assistant here never changes what shoppers get. On a new assistant, the name is saved on its V1, which isn't live yet. If the site already had an assistant whose version has been live, the name is saved as a new version and the live one stays as it is. Either way, the new name reaches shoppers only when that version goes live.
When you're happy, Try my assistant, then put it live completes onboarding and takes you to the Playground.
Try it, then go live
You land in the Playground with your assistant selected, and the Go live confirmation opens on top of it. It opens on the version you renamed on the review screen, or else on the assistant's most recent version if it has never been live. An assistant that already answers on the site, and that you didn't rename, gets no confirmation. It opens once: reloading the page doesn't bring it back. It doesn't open at all when you can't put the assistant live (see below).
The confirmation also tells you whether your storefront can show the assistant yet:
- Tag activity was seen on your site in the last 7 days.: the hourly homepage check found the tag, or the tag recorded activity on your pages, in the last 7 days.
- No tag activity detected on your site in the last 7 days. Shoppers see the assistant once the tag is installed.: with an Install the tag link to the site's Site settings → Installation tab. This doesn't prove the tag is missing: a store with no visitors that week reads the same.
Confirm with Go live and the assistant answers shoppers on the site, wherever the tag is installed. Or close the confirmation to try the assistant first: ask it a product question. What it knows at this point is what the analysis wrote plus, if a catalog is connected, your live catalog and cart.
While the assistant isn't live, a Not live yet bar sits above the Playground: "Assistant does not answer shoppers yet. Try it here, then put it live." Its Go live button opens the confirmation again. When you can't put it live, the bar says why instead of offering the button:
- you don't have Agents: Edit, or you don't have Sites: Edit (needed to change which agent answers on the site);
- the version isn't ready, for example the site has no enabled language.
The bar belongs to this arrival from onboarding. Opened from the sidebar, the Playground doesn't show it; the agent's own pages show Not live yet next to Go live instead.
Where each value comes from
| Value | Source |
|---|---|
| Site name | Your <title>, else og:site_name, else the domain name. |
| Site URL | The final address after redirects. |
| Site language | Your <html lang="…">, if it's one of the six supported languages. Otherwise English. |
| Assistant name | "Assistant" plus the site name. |
| Shopper-facing name | The same, shortened at a word boundary to fit the 40-character display name limit, stored for the detected language. |
| What you sell / Tone of voice | Written by the analysis from a web search plus a read of your own pages. Always in English, whatever your dashboard language. |
| Business vertical | Classified by the analysis. Not shown on the review screen; see it in Site settings → Brand. |
| Catalog connection | Only when the platform is confirmed (see below). |
Catalog connection
Onboarding creates a Shopify connector only when it can prove the platform, not when something merely answers.
It derives the conventional Shopify commerce-protocol endpoint from your host, performs a real MCP handshake, and confirms the response carries Shopify's own signature: a product-catalog tool plus a response header only Shopify's server sends. Both have to be there. A different MCP server, a server that answers but doesn't match, a timeout, or an endpoint that isn't publicly reachable all mean the same thing: no result, and no connector.
- Confirmed: a Shopify connector is created for your domain and pinned to your assistant's first version, so the assistant can search your catalog and read the cart from its very first conversation. No second step, no tools to load.
- Not confirmed: your site is recorded as Custom, no connector is created, and the review screen says so. Add one yourself from Connectors, then link it to a new configuration version.
Nothing is guessed
We never create a connector on a hunch. Guessing the platform would bind your assistant to a tool surface nobody inspected, which is worse than no connector at all.
If we can't read your store
Research can come back with nothing usable: a storefront behind aggressive bot protection, an address with almost no public content. When that happens you get an email saying so, and the flow sends you to We couldn't learn much about your store.
Your assistant already exists at this point and works in the Playground: it was created when you submitted the address, not when the analysis finished. What it's missing is knowledge of your brand. The screen asks for a couple of sentences about what you sell:
- Use this saves your description as the site's "what you sell" text and takes you to the Playground, with the Go live confirmation, as at the end of the review.
- Skip for now takes you straight there. You can fill it in later from Site settings → Brand, by hand or with its Generate button.
Writing a description here needs the same Sites: Edit permission as the review screen's fields. Without it, the text box isn't shown at all: the subtitle says so, and only Skip for now appears.
A failed analysis never erases anything: whatever was already stored on the site stays as it is.
When shoppers start getting answers
Finishing onboarding doesn't put the assistant in front of anyone. A new assistant is created offline, and the site has no assistant answering until a member confirms Go live. Then the assistant needs a way to reach shoppers:
- On your storefront: paste the web tag and wire a trigger. See the Quickstart or Embedding the assistant.
- On your AI Storefront: turn on Publish your AI Storefront in the site's Site settings → AI Storefront tab, then save. It's off by default, and the switch stays disabled until an agent answers on the site. See AI Storefront.
Going live and installing the tag can happen in either order. Until both are done, the only place the assistant answers is your own Playground. If you skipped Go live during onboarding, find it later on the agent's page: see Put an agent live.
Joining a team that has no site yet
If you were invited into an organization that has no site, what you see depends on your role.
- You can edit sites (the Sites: Edit permission): you get the storefront address step and can add the first site yourself.
- You can't: you see No site is set up yet. The screen says an admin of the organization has to add the first site, lists the organization's admins (name and email) and tells you that you'll reach the dashboard as soon as they do. It does not notify anyone, so contact them yourself. If your role can't read the member list, the screen says "Contact an admin of your organization to add the first site." instead of the list. From there you can Create an organization of your own or Sign out.
A member without the permission is never sent into someone else's analysis or review screens by onboarding. If the organization already has a site, they go straight to the dashboard.
Adding another storefront later
Adding a second store runs the storefront step on its own: the site switcher's Create site action asks for the storefront address and provisions the same way (site, assistant, catalog connection where confirmed, then the same analysis and review) and ends the same way, with Go live in the Playground. It uses your current organization.
Creating another organization
Create organization in the user menu's organization level (click your avatar, then the row with your organization's name) opens /onboarding/organization/new. It always shows the organization step, even when your current organization already has sites. The page offers a Back to organization link that returns you to the dashboard, and says the new organization stays separate from your others, with its own sites and members. Submitting creates the organization, switches you to it, and takes you to the storefront step for its first site.
Old bookmarks still work
The older onboarding screens lived at /onboarding/step1 and
/onboarding/step2. Both redirect to /onboarding, which routes you to
wherever you actually stand.