AI Ghost Shopper
AI tools for e-commerce businesses
Startup / E-Commerce AI
The story
Ghost Shopper came out of watching small e-commerce sellers try to compete with brands that have entire growth teams. They're expected to personalise, automate, and analyse everything, usually alone, with no engineering background. I wanted to see how much of that I could hand to AI without asking the merchant to change how they work.
Why I built it
Most 'AI for e-commerce' tools assume you'll rebuild your workflow around them. Small merchants don't have time for that - they need something that plugs into what they're already running.
What I built
AI tooling that sits on top of an existing store and automates the repetitive parts - the tasks a merchant would do themselves if they had the hours in the day - without a migration or a new dashboard to learn.
What I did
- Built the MVP from concept to working demo
- Worked directly with an investor on strategy and milestones
- Ran user research to figure out what merchants actually wanted automated
- Prepared and ran the proof-of-concept demos
How I built it
Build flow
Store connection -> data ingestion -> AI processing -> merchant-facing dashboard.
How it works
The tool connects to a merchant's store, reads the relevant data, runs it through AI models tuned for that task, and surfaces the result - or takes the action directly - through a simple dashboard.
Software
What was hard
- Every e-commerce platform exposes data differently, so integration is never a one-time job
- Getting AI output reliable enough that a merchant would trust it unsupervised
- Working out how much control to automate away versus leave with the merchant
Demos and build notes
Results & impact
- ✓ MVP ready to demo
- ✓ Investor partnership in place to push toward real merchants
What I'd tell past me
- An investor asking 'does this move revenue' cuts scope faster than any planning meeting
- E-commerce tools live or die on trust - the AI has to be right more often than a human would tolerate a mistake
If I keep going
- Run a pilot with a handful of real merchants
- Add more platform integrations based on what they actually ask for