Ecommerce AI Agents for UK Online Retailers

It is software that does one store job from start to finish. It reads a customer email, a return request, a trade order or a stock report, looks the facts up in your own systems, and prepares the answer, refund, quote or purchase order. A person approves anything that moves money or changes a price. We build each one for your store, and you own it.

No. An ecommerce chatbot, including a plain ChatGPT chat, answers what you type. It holds none of your store’s API keys, returns rules or approval steps. An ecommerce agent is built around a model like it and given those: read access to your orders, a courier tracking lookup, a way to save a draft refund, and rules about when to stop and ask a person. Giving it those things is the build.

We look at four places first. Customer service: questions about orders, deliveries and returns. Product data, where listings for Amazon.co.uk, eBay and your own store have to say the same thing. Trade sales, where buyers email orders that someone retypes. And the back office, where orders, stock and payouts have to reach Xero or Sage. We start with whichever costs your team the most hours.

Buy the app if it already does the job. Helpdesk AI such as the Gorgias AI Agent or Intercom’s Fin, which also works inside Zendesk, handles plenty of standard questions. A custom agent makes sense when the job follows your own rules, crosses two systems such as Shopify and Linnworks, or covers a marketplace the apps ignore. Many stores run both: an app on chat and a built agent on returns or trade orders.

Yes, and we usually suggest it as the first job. It works the same for Royal Mail, DPD and Evri parcels. The agent finds the order, reads the tracking number and courier from your store or your shipping software, checks the latest status and replies in the channel the customer used. It only reads data, so the risk is low. We still make it confirm who is asking before it shares an address or a delivery detail.

It can check each request against your returns policy and the UK cancellation window, then prepare the refund. GOV.UK says customers can cancel most online orders up to 14 days after delivery, and up to 12 months if you never told them about that right. The agent dates every request from the delivery date. A person approves the refund before money goes back through Stripe, Klarna or Clearpay.

It can draft and send listing changes through each marketplace’s own API. Amazon’s documentation warns that attributes left out of a full listing update may be dropped, so our agent uses partial updates and previews errors first. On eBay, an inventory item with a SKU must exist before an offer, and the published offer is what becomes the live listing. Price changes stay with a person.

Each marketplace has its own seller integration and its own product data rules. OnBuy publishes an API for products, listings by SKU and order export, and Etsy’s Open API v3 covers inventory, sales orders and shop management. Before we quote, we read the integration terms for your seller account and check whether your existing channel software, such as Linnworks or Brightpearl, already lists there. The agent then works on the product data and order flow behind those channels, whichever tool publishes the listing.

Trade buyers often email a list of codes and quantities. The agent matches each line to a product, applies that account’s price list, checks stock and saves a draft quote or order for your sales team to send. GPSUK, a UK promotional products supplier, runs its trade store on Commerceflo, where business buyers reorder at their own account prices. The agent work sits on the same kind of data.

It can. The agent reads stock on hand and recent sales from wherever stock lives, which for many UK sellers is Linnworks, Brightpearl, Mintsoft or an ERP, compares them with the reorder points you set, and drafts a purchase order for your buyer to approve. It never sends a supplier order on its own until you have seen enough correct drafts to change that rule.

Shopify and Shopify Plus, WooCommerce, Adobe Commerce (Magento), BigCommerce, Commerceflo and custom or headless stores. A back-office agent talks to the platform through its admin API, the back-office door to orders and products, so the platform matters less than you might expect. A customer-facing agent has to fit your theme or front end, which is where most of the platform-specific work sits.

Through their APIs. Brightpearl’s API documentation covers sales orders, products and price lists, goods-in and goods-out notes, stock transfers and journals. Linnworks publishes an API for building applications on Linnworks data. When one of these is already the record for stock and orders, the agent reads from it and writes drafts back to it, so your team keeps working in the screen they know.

It can, and for VAT that link matters. HMRC’s Making Tax Digital notice says copy and paste is not a digital link, and that manually moving data between software is not acceptable once it is part of your VAT records. An agent that moves order, refund and fee data by API keeps that chain digital. Your accountant decides which accounts and tax codes each entry posts to.

Yes. In many UK businesses the ERP (the back-office system for stock, buying and accounts) holds stock, customer prices and credit terms, and the store copies them. The agent reads those facts from NetSuite, Dynamics 365 Business Central, Odoo or Sage Intacct and writes draft quotes and sales orders back for your team to check. Credit over a customer’s limit always goes to a person.

It is as safe as the key it is given. Each agent gets its own API key with the least access its job needs, starts read-only, and logs every action. Refunds, discounts, price changes and anything touching Stripe, GoCardless, Klarna or Clearpay wait for a person. If the agent misbehaves you can switch off one key without touching the rest of your setup.

With safeguards, yes. The Data (Use and Access) Act 2025 received Royal Assent on 19 June 2025 and changed the UK GDPR rules on automated decisions. ICO draft guidance on Article 22C says that for significant decisions made solely by automation, you must give people information about the decision, let them make representations, offer human intervention and let them contest it. We keep a person on refusals, so the agent drafts and staff decide.

For shoppers in the EU, plan on it. Article 50 of the EU AI Act says AI systems that talk directly with people must be designed so those people are told they are dealing with an AI, unless that is obvious from the context. The Act’s published timeline applies Article 50 from 2 August 2026. Our shopper-facing agents say they are an AI in their first message, for UK and EU customers alike.

It can. Article 2 covers providers placing AI systems on the EU market wherever they are based, and providers and deployers (businesses using an AI system) outside the EU where the system’s output is used in the EU. A UK store whose chat agent answers shoppers in Ireland, France or Germany is in that picture. We are not lawyers, so we map where your agents touch EU customers and you confirm the position with your adviser.

UK market ranges vary widely. Softomate Solutions, a London agency, lists £15,000 to £40,000 for an advanced build with deep CRM and ERP integration, and £40,000 or more for multiple agents, and its page notes that prices exclude VAT. Cloudswitched, a London IT services firm, lists £15,000 to £40,000 for a reactive agent and £35,000 to £80,000 for a task agent, without saying whether VAT is included. FactoryJet quotes a fixed price in writing after a short scoping call.

Before any contract we show working software on your own data. For a store agent that usually means twenty or thirty of your real customer emails, return requests or trade orders run through a first version, with its drafts set beside what your team actually sent. You judge it on your own cases.

A short written brief is best, and an RFP is welcome. Name the job you want the agent to do first, the systems it touches (store platform, marketplaces, channel or stock software, accounting or ERP, helpdesk), your rough monthly order and message volumes, and what a person must still approve. Attach a few anonymised examples. With that we can come back with a fixed quote for the first phase.

You own the code and the repository from day one. Defects are fixed inside the build price for a cover period agreed before work starts. Support after that is optional, each change is quoted and approved, and there is no monthly minimum. If you want, we keep managing the servers, AI models, API connections and maintenance, and FactoryJet quotes that support as a fixed price in writing.

Yes. GPSUK, a UK supplier of branded promotional products, runs its trade storefront on Commerceflo, built by FactoryJet, so business buyers reorder at their own account prices. FactoryJet has worked with more than 500 businesses since 2014.