Training your agent

cobay learns from three places: your Shopify catalog (automatic), the knowledge you add (policies, FAQs, shipping), and your voice settings. Here's how each works.

Your catalog — automatic

The moment you connect Shopify, cobay ingests your products, prices, inventory, and store policies. There is nothing to upload and nothing to maintain — when you change a price, retire a product, or run out of stock, cobay stays in sync as your store changes.

This is what makes answers grounded: when a shopper asks “is this in stock?” or “where’s my order?”, the answer comes from your live Shopify data — never guessed, never made up.

Knowledge — policies, FAQs, shipping

Some answers don’t live in your catalog: return windows, shipping cutoffs, sizing advice, ingredient questions. Add those in Dashboard → Knowledge: paste the text, and cobay splits it into chunks and indexes it for semantic search, so the agent can pull the right passage into the right conversation.

Good things to add first:

  • Your shipping policy — carriers, timelines, cutoffs, international rules.
  • Your returns and exchange policy — windows, conditions, how refunds work.
  • The questions your inbox gets every week — sizing, materials, care, compatibility.

The Knowledge page lists every source you’ve added with its chunk count, so you can see exactly what your agent knows.

If cobay doesn't know, it doesn't improvise

When a question falls outside your catalog and knowledge, the agent says so and hands off to a human rather than inventing an answer. Adding knowledge is how you shrink that hand-off rate. See Troubleshooting & handoff.

Voice — name, tone, colors

In Dashboard → Settings you control how the agent presents itself on your storefront:

  • Agent name — what it calls itself when it greets shoppers.
  • Tone— a short description like “friendly, helpful, and on-brand” that shapes how it writes.
  • Primary and accent colors — the widget picks these up automatically; change them once and your storefront updates.