Quick start

This guide takes a new account from sign-up to first AI visibility audit in about fifteen minutes. It covers catalogue import, the onboarding checklist, the first Prompt Runs session, and reading the dashboard. No code required.

Before you start

You need three things: an email address, a public URL for at least one product (Shopify storefront URL, sitemap, or CSV with PDP URLs), and ten minutes of attention. The first audit runs while you finish your coffee.

Two pieces of context help. eCommerce Insights is channel-aware: an Amazon SKU is scored differently from a D2C SKU. And it scores product visibility, not brand visibility. See AI visibility for what this means in practice.

Step 1: Sign up

1. Open the trial form

   Go to /free-trial/. The form asks for work email, brand name, and storefront URL. No credit card.

2. Confirm via email

   You will receive a magic-link confirmation. Click through; the link takes you to an empty eCommerce Insights workspace with the onboarding ring waiting at Home.

3. Set brand voice (optional but recommended)

   Open Settings → Brand voice. The brand voice you set here is prefixed onto every recommendation eCommerce Insights writes. If you skip it, recommendations use a neutral D2C voice.

Step 2: Import a catalogue

You have three paths.

Step 3: Walk the onboarding checklist

The Home view shows a six-step progress ring. The ring auto-ticks as you complete each step; you do not need to mark anything manually.

Import

Completed in step 2 above.

First audit

Click any SKU row from the Products table and eCommerce Insights runs the PDP Score on demand. The audit takes ten to thirty seconds per SKU.

Brand voice

Settings → Brand voice. One paragraph or a URL pointing to a style guide.

Reviews

Settings → Personas. Upload a reviews CSV (Yotpo, Judge.me, Okendo, or Trustpilot export). eCommerce Insights clusters the reviews into four to eight personas.

First Monitor

The Prompt Runs run from step 4 ticks this off.

First alert

Settings → Alerts. Create a rule (most users start with "Score drops below 60 on any tracked SKU" delivered to Slack).

Step 4: Run your first Prompt Runs session

Open Prompt Runs. Pick three prompts a customer would ask. Two patterns work well for a first run.

• One category-defining prompt: "best portable air purifier for a 200 sq ft bedroom under $200"
• One feature-comparison prompt: "is the Vornado AC1 better than the Levoit Core 300 for cat allergies"
• One brand-direct prompt: "are Vornado air purifiers worth the price"

Submit. eCommerce Insights fans the prompts out to ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, and Google AI Overviews in parallel. Results stream back in a side-by-side panel with citations and mention detection per engine.

Step 5: Read the dashboard

Three views matter on day one.

1. Products table — sort by Score ascending. The bottom of the list is the work queue. Click into the worst SKU; the right panel shows the diff between current PDP and the recommended rewrite.
2. Score detail — opens the five-bucket breakdown (GEO, Content, Semantic, Visual, Technical) with each criterion marked pass / partial / fail. Recommendations are ordered by impact, not by bucket.
3. Prompt Runs — shows which engines cited you, which mentioned a competitor first, and which ignored the category entirely. A "you are missing from this answer" verdict per engine, per prompt.

What to do next

By the end of this guide you have a working audit, a brand voice configured, and at least one Prompt Runs session in the log. Three reads from here.

• Read AI visibility for the conceptual frame.
• Read PDP Score to understand how each criterion is graded.
• Connect the Shopify integration to push approved diffs back to your store with one click.

Common questions