What SuperBot does on Big Cartel
SuperBot gives a Big Cartel store a support agent that answers shipping, sizing, and made-to-order questions on its own - so an independent maker is not answering the same five questions by email every week.
- Built for one-person shops: the agent covers the inbox while you are making, shipping, or asleep.
- Answers made-to-order and turnaround-time questions from your own policy text, so nothing is invented.
- Captures wholesale and commission enquiries with contact details instead of losing them.
- One snippet, one theme edit - no app store and no extra platform fee.
Before you install
The quality of the first answers depends on what a visitor can already read on your site, so publish your current shipping, returns, and contact information before training the agent. Have your site URL and one test page ready.
- Use the site that should be connected to this SuperBot workspace, not a staging copy.
- Check that your policy and product pages are written for customers rather than internal staff.
- Decide where escalations should land: the SuperBot inbox, Slack, or your existing support process.
- Copy the exact snippet from your SuperBot dashboard so the site ID routes conversations to the right workspace.
Install SuperBot on Big Cartel
Customize Design → Advanced → Edit HTML/CSS, before the closing body tag of the layout. Save the theme; Big Cartel serves the change immediately.
- Sign up for SuperBot (free) and create your workspace.
- Add your Big Cartel store URL so SuperBot can crawl your products and pages.
- In your Big Cartel admin, open Customize Design -> Advanced -> Edit HTML/CSS.
- Paste the SuperBot snippet just before the closing body tag in your theme layout and save.
- Tune the widget colours to match your store, then go live.
Check that it is live
Open your site in a private window rather than the editor or preview, because most platforms only serve custom code on the published site. The launcher should appear in the lower corner within a second or two.
- Load a real published URL, not an editor preview or a password-protected page.
- Open the launcher and send a question you know the answer to, then confirm the reply cites your own content.
- Check one product or interior page as well as the home page, since templates can differ.
- If you run several languages or store views, check one page in each.
If the widget does not appear
Almost every failed install is one of four things: the change was never published, a cache is still serving the old page, the snippet carries the wrong site ID, or another script is stripping it.
- Editing HTML/CSS requires a theme that allows code editing — some Big Cartel themes are limited.
- Switching themes replaces the layout, so the snippet must be re-added after a theme change.
- Check on the live store rather than the theme preview.
- Open your browser console and look for a blocked request to superbotapp.ai, which points at a Content-Security-Policy or an ad blocker.
- Confirm the site ID in the snippet matches the workspace you are looking at in the dashboard.
Train and test before you send traffic
Approve a small, representative set of answers before the widget meets real customers. Test the questions that normally create tickets or stop a purchase, and correct the wording once so every later answer inherits it.
- Start with the ten questions your team answers most often.
- Check that policy answers link to the live page that supports them.
- Add a trained answer for anything the agent gets wrong rather than editing the source page twice.
- Decide what should escalate immediately — refunds, complaints, anything account-specific.