Banowi AI Commerce Agent
What it is
Banowi is an AI sales and support agent for Shopify merchants on WhatsApp. It answers customers from live catalogue data, places and tracks orders in the chat, matches payment screenshots to orders and hands off to a human in one click.
I built Banowi AI Commerce Agent, an AI agent that works as a sales and support employee for Shopify stores, starting with merchants in Pakistan, directly on WhatsApp. It isn't a scripted chatbot: it reasons over live Shopify data and a knowledge base to answer customers accurately, any hour of the day.
Result
Merchants get a reliable AI assistant that remembers customers and handles real sales questions on WhatsApp around the clock, without extra staff.
The problem
Merchants lose orders to silence. Questions about stock, delivery charges, cash on delivery and order status arrive on WhatsApp late at night, and payment screenshots pile up waiting to be matched by hand. Answers have to reflect live inventory, pricing and order status, not a stale spreadsheet.
What it does
- One shared inbox for every conversation on the merchant's own WhatsApp Business number, with full history
- Grounded answers on stock, price, sizing and delivery from live Shopify data, and an honest handoff instead of a guess when it doesn't know
- Orders inside the chat: place an order, check where one is or start a return in the same conversation
- Payment screenshot matching: bank and wallet receipts are read and matched to open orders by amount, reference and timing, then held for one-click confirmation
- Human takeover in one click: the assistant stops and stays quiet until the conversation is handed back
- Replies in the customer's language and script, including romanised typing
- Cost per conversation, so merchants see what the automation spends against what it brings in
How it's built
- A real-time sync layer that mirrors Shopify products, inventory, orders and customers into a database through webhooks
- An AI agent pipeline that processes WhatsApp messages, reasons over several data sources and replies or escalates to a person
- WhatsApp Business Platform onboarding through Meta's Embedded Signup, with access tokens encrypted at rest (AES-256-GCM) and every query scoped to a single merchant
- A merchant dashboard to monitor conversations, manage orders, review payments and audit AI decisions
