Shipping and Returns Chatbot: Answer the Questions Shoppers Ask Most
Shipping and returns are the questions an online store hears most: how long will delivery take, do you ship to my country, who pays for the return, how many days do I have. The answers are on your policy pages, but shoppers ask in chat because it is faster than reading. The risk is a wrong answer: an invented delivery date or a made-up refund rule costs more than no answer at all. This guide shows how to set up a chatbot that answers from your own policies, uses your exact wording where it matters and says when it does not know. It answers questions only; it does not take orders or payments.
Step 1: Collect the questions and the policies behind them
Open your inbox, contact form messages and order notes for the last few months and write down the shipping and returns questions you answer most. Typical ones are delivery times, shipping to other countries, tracking, return windows, who pays return shipping, refunds and exchanges, and damaged items. For each one, find the line in your policy that answers it. If you cannot find it, the chatbot will not find it either: fix the policy page first.
Step 2: Add your policies as sources
Create your chat, enter your store's address and choose the shipping, returns and FAQ pages it should learn from. If your policy lives in a PDF or Word document, add it as a file. Pages behind a login cannot be read. Each answer comes with a numbered source next to the sentence, so a shopper can open the page behind it. By default the chat answers only from the sources you added.
Step 3: Write exact answers for the rules that must not vary
Some answers should never vary: the return window, who pays for return shipping, delivery times by country. For these, write a saved answer on the Knowledge page. Write the question the way a shopper would ask it, add up to five other ways people phrase it under "Also asked as", write the answer and choose "Reply with this answer exactly". When a saved answer set to exactly is a strong match for a question, the chat sends your text word for word, with no AI rewording. A saved answer is searchable at once, without waiting for a sync.
Step 4: Decide what happens when your policies do not answer
Before the AI writes anything, OneType checks how well your content matches the question. If nothing matches well enough, the chat says so instead of guessing, and a second check stops it from answering about a product or name your content never mentions. In the agent's settings, choose what happens next: collect contact details in a short form, apologize in your own words (up to 500 characters), or, with handoff turned on, offer a person from your team. A reply that says it does not know does not use AI credits.
Step 5: Test with real questions, then watch what shoppers ask
Open the live test and ask the questions shoppers ask, one at a time, in the chat design you picked. Ask one your policies do not cover, to see the "I don't know" reply. If an answer is not what you expected, that usually points to missing or unclear content on your site. After you go live, open the questions the chat could not answer: they are grouped by meaning, with a count. Add the missing line to a policy page or write a saved answer, and it is live from the next conversation. When you spot a wrong reply in a conversation, use "Fix this answer" under it.
Try it on your store
Learn how saved answers keep key rules exact, see how honest "I don't know" replies work, or start free.