--- title: "AI Product Assistant for an Online Store — Case Study" description: "How we added an AI shopping assistant to an ecommerce catalog that consults customers on any product, grounded in the store's real data — boosting product discovery and reducing pre-sale questions." canonical_url: "https://mercurystk.com/case-studies/ai-product-assistant-ecommerce" last_updated: "2026-06-29T04:31:10.401Z" --- ## The challenge An online store with a deep, specialized catalog was losing shoppers who couldn't tell which product was right for them. The differences between items were nuanced, buyers asked the same pre-sale questions over and over, and the team couldn't answer fast enough to keep every visitor from bouncing. > The numbers below are representative of this type of engagement. Real figures > are shared with prospective clients under NDA. ## What we built We embedded an **AI shopping assistant** in the storefront that can consult customers on **any product in the catalog**. It: - Explains what each product is and how products differ - Recommends the right item for a stated goal or use case - Compares options side by side in plain language - Cites the exact product pages its answers come from - Stays inside catalog data — so it never invents specs or makes off-label claims The assistant is available on the homepage and on every product page, pre-loaded with the context of the item the shopper is viewing. ## The approach 1. **Catalog ingestion** — products, categories, and descriptions indexed for retrieval 2. **Retrieval + grounding** so answers stay tied to real products 3. **Guardrails** that keep claims accurate and compliant 4. **Buy-flow handoff** — the assistant links straight to add-to-cart 5. **Analytics** on questions asked, products recommended, and gaps ## Results Shoppers could self-serve product guidance instead of waiting on the team, pre-sale questions dropped sharply, and the assistant nudged buyers toward the right product with sourced, on-brand answers across the entire catalog. ## Stack A retrieval-augmented assistant over the live catalog, deployed on cloud infrastructure and embedded directly in the headless storefront.