Set up your first assistant
Onboarding is two steps, your organization and then your storefront address. It then reads your store and preconfigures an assistant you review before anything goes 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, talking to your own assistant. Nothing reaches a shopper until you install the assistant on your storefront.
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 An invitation that has expired, was revoked, or was sent to another address can't be accepted: the screen says "We couldn't accept that invitation.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.
- Researching your brand: a broad web search for your categories, reputation, and tone.
- Reading your own pages: a fresh, focused read of your own domain.
- 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.
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. Renaming here also updates what shoppers see in chat. |
| Language | The language detected on your storefront. Change it in Settings → Languages. |
| 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 Settings → General.
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 mints a new agent configuration version 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.
When you're happy, Talk to my assistant takes you to the Playground with your new assistant selected. Installing it on your storefront comes next, from the site's Settings → Public access.
Talk to it
You land in the Playground with your assistant preselected. 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.
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 Settings → General. |
| 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 and already works at this point: 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.
- Skip for now takes you straight to the Playground. You can fill it in later from Settings → General, 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.
Nothing reaches a shopper until you install it
Finishing onboarding does not put the assistant in front of anyone. Two separate things have to happen first, and you control both:
- On your storefront: paste the web tag and wire a trigger. See the Quickstart or Embedding the assistant.
- As a standalone link: turn on public access on the site's Settings → Public access page. It's off by default. See Public link.
Until then the only place the assistant answers is your own Playground.
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). It uses your current organization.
Creating another organization
The organization switcher's Create organization 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.