Getting started

Quickstart

Connect Shopify and GA4, read your first ideas, and approve one change. About 30 minutes of work, spread over the first few days while data arrives.

This page is the whole loop, once. Your HI Engine contact does some of these steps with you on a call. Read it ahead of time, or come back to it when a step does not behave.

Before you start

You need admin access to your Shopify store, and edit access to your Google Analytics 4 property. Your HI Engine contact sends you an onboarding link that collects both.

Your contact sends you a link that looks like https://app.hiengine.ai/onboard/<token>. The link is your access — you do not sign in yet.

Fill in the basic details: company name, storefront domain, .myshopify.com domain, industry, and target markets. The page saves each field as you leave it.

Approve the Shopify collaborator request

HI Engine sends a collaborator request to your Shopify admin. Approve it under Settings → Users → Collaborators.

Your contact then creates a custom app inside your store and installs it. You do not have to create the app yourself, and you never handle an access token. See Connect Shopify for the permissions it uses.

Grant Google Analytics access

Add brancoyoy@gmail.com as a Viewer on your GA4 property. Full steps are in Connect Google Analytics 4.

Traffic and conversion data is what turns a guess into a sized estimate. Without GA4, HI Engine still reads Shopify, but the euro figures get weaker.

Wait for the first discovery pass

The agents run over your store and your last few weeks of data. The first pass takes a few hours. Behavioural data from Click Context needs longer — plan for a week before its numbers carry weight.

You get a Slack message, or an email, when the first ideas land.

Read your ideas

Sign in at app.hiengine.ai and open Ideas. Each idea carries a title, the evidence behind it, and an estimated impact in your store currency.

Read Ideas for what the fields mean, and How impact is estimated for where the euro figure comes from.

Approve one idea

Pick one idea and approve it. Approving moves it into the build queue — it does not change your store.

The agent then writes the theme code, runs Shopify Theme Check, and publishes a draft theme named after the task.

Review the draft

When the build finishes, you get a Preview changes link. Open it on a phone and on a desktop, and check the pages the change touches.

Then choose one of three:

  • Approve & Publish — marks the task done and gives you the Shopify theme editor link.
  • Comment — asks for a change. The agent iterates on the same draft theme.
  • Reject — sends the task back to the backlog. The idea survives; only this attempt is rolled back.

Queue a test, then publish

Approve & Publish does not put the theme live.

Set up an A/B test first. Half your visitors see the change, and you publish it to everyone only if it wins. HI Engine can run the split, or you can run it in Intelligems, Shoplift or Shopify Rollouts.

Skip the test only when the change repairs something plainly broken. Then open the theme in your Shopify admin and publish it yourself. That last step is always yours.

What to do next

On this page