AI Commerce Platform
rk Commerce — Shopify AI Shopping Advisor
A Shopify app that adds a RAG-grounded AI shopping advisor to a merchant's store, in two surfaces: an embedded merchant dashboard inside Shopify admin, and a customer-facing chat widget on the storefront — built against Shopify's own App Store requirements, not just a working demo.
Tech stack
Two surfaces, one backend
The app has two customer-facing surfaces sharing one backend: an embedded dashboard merchants use inside Shopify admin, and a chat widget their customers see on the storefront. Both are served by a FastAPI backend on Railway, backed by PostgreSQL with the pgvector extension for the advisor's own retrieval.
Catalogue ingestion, grounded in the real store
Catalogue ingestion runs through Shopify's GraphQL Bulk Operations API rather than paging the Admin API product-by-product, then each product is embedded for vector retrieval — so the advisor's answers are grounded in the merchant's actual catalogue (retrieval-augmented generation), not the model's general knowledge about products it's never seen.
The merchant dashboard
The merchant dashboard is a Next.js app on Vercel, built with Shopify's own Polaris design system and App Bridge, authenticated via session tokens issued inside Shopify admin's own iframe — not a separate login. It includes a conversion funnel report over the advisor's own interactions, so a merchant can see where shoppers drop off after talking to it.
The storefront widget
The storefront widget is served through a Shopify App Proxy, so the customer-facing chat runs on the merchant's own domain rather than a third-party one — and every proxied request is checked against Shopify's HMAC signature before the backend trusts it.
Built for the App Store, not just a demo
The app is built against Shopify's actual App Store requirements, not just a working demo: OAuth scope management for the permissions it actually needs, a published privacy policy for review, and a prepared App Store listing (icon, screenshots, pricing). It isn't publicly installable yet — this is the compliance work that precedes a listing, not a claim that one is live.