Book gift season: budget, occasion and recipient, and what to fix in your catalogue first

• Budget: shoppers write a ceiling into the sentence. Make sure each band you care about has books whose descriptions say who they suit, and use your own currency and prices; the assistant shows the price from your catalogue.
• Occasion: a birthday, Christmas, a thank-you, a get-well gift, a graduation. The occasion decides the tone: light, moving, practical or beautiful to look at.
• Recipient: the buyer describes a reader. Readers on public forums ask for books by what they remember, as in “Dystopian novel about twins who switch places”; a gift buyer asks the same way, about someone else’s taste.
• The fear underneath: giving a book the person already owns or will not finish. Shoppers want a reason on the card they can check.

• Write what each book is about in two or three plain sentences, including genre, setting and era.
• Say who a book suits: a first-time reader of the genre, a fan of a well-known author, a teenager, a keen cook.
• State the format (hardback, paperback, illustrated, box set); gift buyers care how it looks and feels.
• Name gift editions and box sets as such.
• Keep price and stock current in Shopify; the assistant reads them from your catalogue by product ID.

It reads the request in the shopper’s words and picks one product from your catalogue with a one-line reason. The name, price and stock on the card come from your catalogue by product ID. The reason is written by the AI, labelled as such, and can be wrong. If nothing in your catalogue fits, it says so and, where your consent settings allow, takes a contact and writes the request to your Requests tab, so you see which gifts people wanted and you did not have.

Your own delivery times and cut-off dates apply, not ours. Publish them where gift shoppers look, and tell them to order early before Christmas. The assistant does not know your cut-off unless it is written in your store policies or product data.

Install OneSite Assistant from the Shopify App Store. In the Shopify app you approve the plan right after install and start with a free trial. See the pricing and the questions worth asking before you install.

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