Most Shopify apps make you fill out 15 forms before anything works. We thought: what if you just clicked one button? That's how our setup wizard was born — and people keep asking what actually happens while it runs.
So here's a completely honest, behind-the-scenes look at what our wizard does when you click "Start Setup Wizard." No marketing fluff — just the actual technical steps explained in plain English.
You Click One Button (That's Actually It)
When you first install FunctionalAI from the Shopify App Store, the app opens on a screen with one button on it: Start Setup Wizard.
That's it. One button. No "What's your business category?" dropdown. No "Describe your brand voice in 500 characters." Just click and watch it work.
Step 1: Fetching Your Store Data
The first thing the wizard does is pull data from your Shopify store. Here's what it grabs:
Reads your store
- Pages
- Blog posts
- Products, and collections if you have them
Builds its knowledge
- Creates a knowledge store
- Adds what it read as files that keep themselves up to date
Creates your assistant
- Writes its instructions from your store and adds suggested questions
- Links the knowledge to it
- Turns on the Shopify tools: product search, recommendations, discounts, order lookup
- Makes it public, so the widget can use it
- Selects it in the app and sets the widget to visible
- Products Retrieved: all your products with names, descriptions, prices, images, and variants
- Pages Retrieved: About pages, shipping info, return policy — anything you've published
- Blogs Retrieved: if you have blog posts, those get pulled too (great for FAQs)
- Collections Retrieved: if you have them; the wizard carries on without them if they can't be read
We fetch your products so the AI can recommend actual items from your catalog. Not generic answers like "check our product page" — it'll say "Yeah, we have that! Here's the Blue Cotton T-Shirt in Medium for $29.99" with a direct link.
Step 2: Building Your Knowledge Base
The wizard takes all that store data and creates a "vector store" — a searchable knowledge base.
- Vector Store Created: a searchable database optimized for AI retrieval
- Files Uploaded: your products, pages, and blog posts get converted into a format the AI can understand
When a customer asks "Do you ship to Germany?", the AI doesn't just guess — it searches your shipping page, finds the relevant info, and answers based on YOUR actual policies. This is called RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation).
Step 3: Creating Your AI Assistant
The wizard builds your assistant. Here's what gets configured automatically:
- Assistant Created: an OpenAI-powered chatbot configured for e-commerce support
- Vector Store Linked: connects your knowledge base to the assistant
- Template Linked: turns on the Shopify tools (product search, collections, recommendations, discounts and order lookup)
- Shared Assistant Created: makes the assistant public, so the chat widget can use it
- Shopify Configuration Updated: selects the new assistant in the app's settings and sets the widget to visible
The "Assistant" is the brain: its instructions, its knowledge and its tools. Making it public (the "Shared Assistant") is what lets the widget on your store talk to it.
What You Get at the End
The wizard usually takes 2–5 minutes, longer for a large catalogue. When it finishes, you have:
- An assistant with instructions written from your store and catalogue
- A knowledge base of your products, pages, blog posts and collections that keeps itself up to date (products every 4 hours, the rest daily)
- The Shopify tools switched on: product search, recommendations, discounts and order lookup
- Everything connected and ready to test in the dashboard, with no code
The One Step Left: Switch On the App Embed
Shopify doesn't let an app switch itself on in your storefront, so the last step is yours, and it is why nothing changes for shoppers until you are ready. In your Shopify admin, open Online Store → Themes → Customize, then App embeds, switch on the chat widget and save. The app's settings page has a shortcut to the theme editor and a button to check it worked.
Two things are still up to you after that: your brand colour (the widget starts on its default look) and human handoff, which starts switched off.
Being Honest: What the Wizard Can't Do
The wizard gets you most of the way. The rest — your specific brand voice, edge cases, unique business rules — is where you come in.
- Write your brand voice for you (it uses a friendly, professional default)
- Handle super niche product questions if the info isn't in your Shopify data
- Configure complex custom workflows (like "if customer asks X, do Y")
- Magically know internal policies that aren't documented anywhere
But here's the thing: most store owners don't need perfect on day one. They need something working that handles "Where's my order?" and "Do you ship to [country]?" so they can stop answering the same questions 50 times a day.
The TL;DR Version
No forms. No manual uploads. No waiting for support. Just one click and actual automation.