Knowledge base
Tell your AI agent your shipping times, return policy and sizing, so it answers correctly instead of guessing.
An AI agent can look up anything that lives in Shopify — order status, product details, stock. It cannot know your return window, because that's your policy, not Shopify data.
The knowledge base is where you put everything else. It's the difference between an agent that helps and an agent that hedges.
Do this before you turn agents on
An agent with an empty knowledge base will either hand over constantly or, worse, make something up. Fifteen minutes here is the highest-value setup work in the whole AI section.
Add these six things first
In this order — it's roughly what customers ask most:
- Shipping. How long it takes, where you ship, what it costs.
- Returns and exchanges. The window, the condition, who pays return postage.
- Sizing and fit. If you sell anything worn.
- Payment methods. Including COD, if you offer it.
- Changing an order. Can they change the address after ordering?
- Product care. Washing, storage, warranty.
Six good FAQ entries beat an entire website indexed badly. Don't try to be comprehensive on day one.
The four ways to add information
| Type | Best for |
|---|---|
| FAQ | A question and its answer. The most precise option — start here. |
| Text | Pasted content: policies, guides. |
| URL | A page Enscale fetches and indexes for you. |
| File | An uploaded document. |
Writing entries that actually work
Be specific and use numbers. "Returns accepted within 30 days of delivery, unworn with tags attached" can be answered. "We have a flexible returns policy" cannot — the agent will either hedge uselessly or invent a number.
One topic per FAQ. An entry covering shipping, returns and sizing gets pulled up for all three questions and answers none of them well.
Write it how customers ask it. "How long does delivery take?" works far better than "Fulfilment SLA". Your customers don't use your internal vocabulary.
Always state the exceptions. If sale items aren't returnable, put that in the returns entry. An agent that confidently states your general rule and misses the exception creates an angry customer and a support ticket.
Keep it current. A knowledge base describing last season's shipping times is worse than no knowledge base — the agent will state the outdated policy with total confidence, and the customer will believe it.
Check the status before blaming the agent
| Status | Means |
|---|---|
| Pending | Queued |
| Processing | Being indexed |
| Ready | Available to agents |
| Failed | Couldn't be processed |
A source only affects answers once it says Ready. If an agent gives a wrong answer right after you added a policy, check the status first — it's usually just still indexing.
Failures are nearly always an unreachable URL, a page that needs JavaScript to display its content, or an unsupported file type. Paste the content in as Text instead.
A warning about URL sources
Pointing at your existing policy pages seems efficient, and sometimes is. Two things go wrong:
- Pages that build their content with JavaScript often index as empty. The agent gets nothing, and you won't know unless you check.
- A page mixing your policy with navigation, promo banners and footer text indexes all of it, which dilutes the actual answer.
For anything important, paste the specific policy text as a Text source rather than pointing at the page it lives on. It takes an extra minute and it's much more reliable.
Knowledge base vs. agent instructions
People mix these up constantly. They do different jobs:
| Knowledge base | Agent instructions | |
|---|---|---|
| Holds | Facts about your business | How the agent should behave |
| Example | "Returns accepted within 30 days" | "Be concise. Never promise a refund." |
| Used | When relevant to the question | On every single message |
Facts go in the knowledge base. Tone, boundaries and escalation rules go in instructions.
Putting facts in instructions means they're sent on every request whether relevant or not. Putting behaviour rules in the knowledge base means they only apply when they happen to be retrieved — which is unpredictable, and exactly what you don't want from a safety rule.
Test what you added
Ask the agent the questions you added the sources for. Then push harder:
- The exceptions, not just the general rule.
- Something you deliberately didn't cover. It should hand over, not guess. See Handover.
- Anything about money or promises. Should escalate every time.
- Awkward phrasings. Ask it the way a rushed customer would type it, not the way you wrote it.
Common questions
Next steps
- AI agents — configuring the agent.
- AI handover — using handover reasons to find gaps.
- AI usage and spend — what this costs to run.