Shopify and electronics retailer
Which document answers a fault question on a Shopify store
An assistant answers from the document that matches best, which means the set of documents a store happens to own decides what it says. Shopify hands every merchant the same starter set, and for electronics that set has a hole in exactly the place where the money is: there is a refund policy, there is whatever the manufacturer wrote about warranty, and there is nothing at all about the rights a buyer has against you after the warranty has run out.
Why this pairing is its own job
The Shopify install guide covers the tag, and the electronics retailer guide covers what the assistant has to know. What follows is the part that belongs to neither.
- The specification table is a metafield the theme paints into a tab, or an app that draws it after the page has loaded. Where the theme prints it into the markup it can be read; where an app draws it later it cannot. Both look identical on your screen, which is why this is worth checking rather than assuming.
- The document that actually settles a compatibility question is the manufacturer's, and the link on your product page points at the brand's domain. A crawl of your site reads your site. A specification sitting on somebody else's server does not become your material by being linked to.
- Warranty questions need three separate documents, not one: what you cover as the seller, what the manufacturer covers, and the position underneath both when goods are not of satisfactory quality. Merge them into one page called Information, as most stores do, and the wrong half wins the match.
- Shopify's policy generator produces a refund policy, a shipping policy and terms of service. It does not produce a statutory rights explainer, so on a default store the only document that mentions a fault at all is the warranty, and it wins by being the only candidate.
What changes about the install here
<script src="https://cdn.askably.xyz/w.js" data-key="pk_live_YOUR_KEY" defer></script>The tag is the same one on the Shopify guide. Everything below is about where it goes on a electronics retailer site specifically.
Find out which of your tabs are really in the page
Open a product page and view the page source, not the inspector. The inspector shows you the page after everything has run, which is the view that hides this problem. The source is roughly what a crawler was handed.
Search it for a value you can see on the screen: a port name, a wattage, a supported standard. If the value is there, your theme is printing the specification into the markup and the assistant can read it. If it is not, the table is being drawn afterwards and there is nothing to index.
When it is missing, the fix is not to fight the app. Write a specification page per range, in prose, covering the connectors, the power requirement and what each product will and will not drive, and let the app carry on doing its job for shoppers.
Decide about the manufacturer documents before you upload any
You can upload documents, so the temptation is to upload the manuals. Do not. A manual teaches the assistant to walk somebody through a menu that has been renamed since it was written, and a customer following confident instructions for a screen that no longer exists concludes the product is broken and sends it back.
The specification sheet is the useful half of the same document. It states what the thing is, and it stays true across firmware. Upload that, and point at the manufacturer's support pages for procedure rather than trying to own it.
Where the answerable material lives
| A statutory rights page you had to write yourself | The position in the market you trade in when goods are not of satisfactory quality, how long it runs, and that it is separate from the warranty printed on the box. Shopify does not generate this one, so it exists only if somebody sits down and writes it, and it is the single most valuable page an electronics store can add. |
|---|---|
| Warranty in two blocks, clearly labelled | What you handle and what goes to the manufacturer, with the answer to where do I go first stated in each. Customers conflate them, staff conflate them, and an assistant reading one merged page sends people to the wrong place with total confidence. |
| Specifications as prose, one page per range | Connectors, supported standards, power requirements, physical dimensions, what is in the box. Written as sentences rather than left as a table an app renders, because the sentence survives being pulled out of the page and quoted back on its own. |
| Price match terms written as conditions | Which retailers count, whether the competing item has to be in stock, whether marketplace sellers are excluded, how long after purchase a claim can be made, and what proof you want. It is the most rules heavy promise in the shop, so the material has to read as rules rather than as a headline. |
The first thing to get right
Write and publish the statutory rights page, recrawl, then ask the assistant what happens if something breaks after eighteen months and look at which document it cites.
Before that page exists the honest answer to that question does not exist on your site, so the assistant will quote the warranty and tell a customer they are out of time. That is a wrong answer given in your name about a legal position, and it is the one failure in this trade that turns into a complaint rather than a return.
The failure that belongs to this combination
The warranty closes a question that the warranty does not govern
A customer reports a fault at eighteen months. The assistant searches for material about faults, finds the manufacturer warranty because it is the only document using that vocabulary, and reports accurately that cover ran out at twelve months. Everything about the reply is correct except the conclusion.
The citation makes it look researched, which is what makes it expensive. The customer reads a sourced answer, believes it, and either goes away angry or comes back later having been told elsewhere that the shop was wrong.
Two changes fix it and neither is a setting. Publish the rights position as its own document so a fault question has somewhere better to land, and write the first line of it in the words customers actually use, about something breaking rather than about conformity, so it matches the way the question arrives.
Before you go live
- The origin the page is served from has to be on the allowlist for that assistant, or nothing renders and the browser console says which origin was refused. An apex domain and its www are two different origins to a browser, so list both, along with any staging or preview host you want it to work on.
- Open the site as a visitor would, on the pages a electronics retailer visitor actually lands on, and ask it something only your own material could answer. A widget that renders is not the same as a widget that has read anything.
Questions
- Can we just upload the manufacturer PDFs?
- Upload the specification sheets, not the manuals. A specification is a set of facts that stays true. A manual is a procedure that goes out of date with the next firmware release, and an assistant reading procedure will give somebody step by step instructions for a menu that has moved.
- Our spec tables come from an app. Is that a problem?
- It depends entirely on whether the app puts the table into the page or draws it afterwards, and the only way to know is to look at the source of a product page. If the numbers are not in there, they are not in what was crawled, however clearly they appear on screen.
- Somebody asks whether a product is the latest model. What does it say?
- Whatever your pages say, and pages outlive the model. A superseded product page still reads in the present tense, so unless the older page was updated or removed, the assistant has no way to know it has been replaced. Treat is this current as a question to hand over rather than one to answer.
Keep reading
- Installing on ShopifyPaste one script tag into theme.liquid, list both store origins, and know why the widget cannot appear on the Shopify checkout.
- Everything for a electronics retailerCompatibility, warranty and returns on opened items answer well from your own terms. Firmware level setup advice does not.
- Selling bikes on one origin and booking the workshop on anotherThe bikes sell on Shopify and the workshop books somewhere else. Two origins, a geometry chart that is an image, and frame sizes as options.
- A garden centre whose questions are mostly not about the shopHours, dogs, the cafe and the compost delivery area are the real questions, and none of them live in the shop. Where to put them instead.
- One assistant per store view, because the rights differConsumer rights differ by market and Magento already splits your storefronts by store view. Give each one its own assistant and its own pages.
Try it on your own material
Upload a document or point it at your site, paste one line of HTML, then ask it something only your business could answer.