How to Add an AI Chatbot to Your Shopify Store (Step by Step)

Every Shopify store gets the same questions on repeat: Do you ship to my country? How long do returns take? Is this in stock? When those questions go unanswered — because it's 11pm, or you're packing orders — the visitor doesn't email you. They just leave.

An AI chatbot trained on your store's actual policies fixes that. This guide walks through adding one to any Shopify store in about 10 minutes, using a single embed snippet — no app to install from the Shopify App Store, which means nothing extra slowing your theme down and no monthly app fee stacked on top of everything else.

What you'll need

• A Shopify store on any plan (this works on Basic upward, including trials)
• A free Naruva account — the free plan covers 1 chatbot and 50 messages/month, enough to test it on real traffic
• Your store's FAQ, shipping policy, and return policy — in any format

Step 1: Create your chatbot and train it on your store

After signing up, create a bot and give it your store's content. You have three ways to do this:

1. Upload documents — PDFs, Word docs, or spreadsheets. Your shipping policy page exported as a PDF works perfectly. Product catalogs in spreadsheet form are great for "is X available in blue?" questions.
2. Paste a URL — point Naruva at your existing FAQ or policy page and it fetches and cleans the content for you.
3. Describe your business — write a few sentences about what you sell and your policies, and AI drafts a structured training document you can edit.

For a typical store, three documents cover most questions: shipping rates and times, the return/exchange policy, and a product overview. See our guide on training a chatbot on your own documents for what to include.

Step 2: Customize it to match your storefront

In the bot's Appearance tab, set the widget color to match your theme, name the bot after your store, and write a welcome message. Add starter prompts for your most common questions — "Track my order", "Shipping rates", "Returns" — so visitors can tap instead of type.

Step 3: Copy the embed snippet

Open the Embed tab in your Naruva dashboard, toggle the bot to public, and copy the snippet. It's a single iframe:

<!-- Paste before the closing </body> tag -->
<iframe
  src="https://naruva.ai/chat/YOUR-BOT-ID"
  style="position:fixed;right:20px;bottom:20px;…"
></iframe>

Step 4: Paste it into your Shopify theme

In your Shopify admin:

1. Go to Online Store → Themes, click the … button on your current theme, and choose Edit code
2. Under Layout, open theme.liquid
3. Scroll to the bottom and paste the snippet just above the closing </body> tag
4. Click Save

Because theme.liquid wraps every page of your store, the chat widget now appears on your homepage, product pages, collections, and cart. If you're not comfortable in the code editor, Shopify's own documentation covers theme editing in detail — help.shopify.com — but it really is a single paste-and-save.

Step 5: Test it like a customer would

Open your storefront in an incognito window and ask the questions your inbox usually gets:

If an answer is wrong or missing, the fix is always the same: update the training document. The bot only answers from your content, so improving the content improves the bot instantly — no retraining step.

Why not just use a Shopify chat app?

Shopify's app store has plenty of live-chat apps, and they're fine if you plan to answer chats yourself in real time. The difference is who does the answering. Live chat is you, on your phone, at dinner. An AI chatbot trained on your policies answers instantly at any hour, and most stores find it resolves the majority of pre-sale questions without a human touching them. Many stores run both: AI first, with your email as the escalation path for anything complex.

That's the whole process. If you sell on Shopify and half your support email is shipping questions, this is one of those rare ten-minute changes that pays for itself the same week. Create your free bot and see what your customers ask first — the dashboard's top-questions report is often an eye-opener on its own.