AI chatbot for Shopify in Italian: how to choose it and how to switch it on

What Shopify changes, compared to any other site

Shopify exposes catalogue, stock and orders through an official API, and lets apps insert themselves into the theme without anyone touching code. Both have to be built by hand elsewhere, and they change how you evaluate an AI assistant.

The first consequence is that an assistant on Shopify has no excuse for not knowing the catalogue. If it answers generic questions but cannot say whether a product is in stock, the limitation is not the platform's.

The second is installation: since 2021, Online Store 2.0 themes have app embeds — a toggle in the theme editor. A vendor still asking you in 2026 to paste a snippet into the theme.liquid file is using a method Shopify itself discourages, and one that leaves residue behind when you uninstall.

How installation actually goes

With Flow-e there are three steps, about five minutes.

1. Install the app from the Shopify App Store. Shopify shows the requested permissions and asks you to approve them. You are never asked to type your store address or generate tokens: Shopify handles it.
2. Land on the portal and take your key. The store already shows as connected. Under Integrations → Installation you will find the API Key.
3. Switch the widget on from the theme editor. Online Store → Themes → Customize → App embeds → Flow-e, toggle on, key pasted into the field, Save.

No theme edits, no uploaded files. The full step-by-step guide also covers requirements and vintage themes.

Which permissions it asks for, and why

Worth reading rather than clicking through. An assistant answering about the catalogue needs to read products and stock; to answer «where is my order» it needs orders; to personalise, customers. Flow-e requests read-only permissions: they serve answering, not changing the store.

The question to ask any vendor: what is each requested permission for? If an app asks for write access to the catalogue in order to do support, the answer should be specific.

The three criteria that matter

Does it read the catalogue live, or a copy? An assistant working on a copy refreshed once a day recommends sold-out products and stale prices. The test: set a product to zero stock and ask whether it is available.

Does it speak Italian, or is it translated? Two different things. Translating the interface is easy; understanding that «something elegant but not too formal» describes a product range is another matter. The test: make a request with an idiomatic expression and see whether it interprets or clings to the words.

Where does the data live? Conversations and customer data end up somewhere, and that somewhere has a jurisdiction. Ask where the servers are, whether conversations are used to train third-party models, and whether a public DPA exists. The subject is covered in full in the guide on AI for e-commerce and GDPR.

What it must actually be able to do

Not «converse»: act. The minimum list, on an e-commerce:

• Find products from a natural-language sentence, not from keywords.
• State real price and availability, right now.
• Compare two products and explain the difference.
• Answer on returns, shipping and sizes using the store's own answers, not generic ones.
• Report an order status.
• Recognise when it does not know and hand over to a person.

How to switch it off

With the same toggle in the theme editor: the widget disappears from the store and the app stays installed. Uninstalling the app from Shopify instead lets Shopify close the subscription itself.

This matters more than it seems: how easily you can leave a vendor tells you how much that vendor expects to keep you with locks rather than with the product.

Flow-e, briefly

Flow-e is an AI Layer for e-commerce built by an Italian company, available on the Shopify App Store. It reads catalogue, prices, stock and orders during the conversation, answers in Italian, keeps data on European servers and publishes its DPA. There is a free preview plan; the paid plans are described in the guide on how much an AI chatbot costs.