An AI Shopping Assistant for Music Planet
iT360 built Echo, a custom AI shopping assistant for Music Planet that answers pricing, stock and product questions from the live Shopify catalogue.
- Client
- Music Planet
- Industry
- Music Retail & Distribution
- Services
- Music Planet (South Pacific Music Distributors): musical instrument retail and distribution
Music Planet sells a large range of musical instruments online. Its Shopify catalogue has hundreds of guitars alone, and prices, stock and promotions change constantly. iT360 built Echo, a custom AI shopping assistant that answers customers’ questions from the live store, so they get accurate answers at any hour without waiting on staff.
The challenge
Music Planet’s customers browse at all hours, but the store is only staffed during business hours. As iT360 CEO David Wilson puts it in the video, picture a parent at nine or ten at night trying to choose a first guitar for a 13-year-old, with nobody to ask.
Customers wanted quick, accurate answers to questions like “what’s your cheapest electric guitar?” or “is this in stock?”. With prices and stock moving all the time, a scripted bot or a static FAQ would soon be out of date. Music Planet needed a chatbot it could trust to give correct answers, not just plausible ones.
“Scripted bots, I think, frustrate people. Reality is AI done well can become an assistant that helps the human in any way, shape, or form.”
David Wilson, CEO, iT360
What we did
iT360 designed and built Echo, named for the music theme, as a custom assistant that checks every answer against Music Planet’s live Shopify catalogue. It answers questions on pricing, stock and product details using current store data. It can also recommend products, handle questions about competitors, suggest alternatives when Music Planet doesn’t carry a particular item, and show product photos in the chat with a button straight through to the product page.
We built in the following:
- Live catalogue search: answers come from the store’s real product data, not a static script.
- Staff-controlled knowledge: an admin area lets Music Planet’s team teach Echo about promotions and sales themselves, with no developer needed.
- Discount display: product tiles show before and after pricing when a deal is on.
- Rigorous testing: we refined Echo’s search logic against an automated test suite and re-checked it against the live store, so its answers stay reliable as the range changes.
- Secure by design: credentials are kept out of the code and the knowledge base is protected.
Echo isn’t an off-the-shelf chatbot with Music Planet’s logo on it. iT360 builds its own assistants, which means it knows exactly how each one works.
“We take the ingredients that are tried and true, we make our own recipe. And therefore, we know every single thing that’s gone in to make the cake, so to speak.”
The result
Music Planet now has a shopping assistant that knows its current range and prices, helps customers through buying decisions on their phone or laptop at any time of day, and can be updated by Music Planet’s own team as promotions come and go.
Why it matters
Echo is an example of how iT360 helps businesses use AI in a practical way: built around their own systems and data, tested thoroughly and maintained as the business changes. A chatbot that talks to customers needs to be right every time.
“We don’t do this blindly. We don’t just hope and pray that AI will say the right thing. We build in the right auditing and tracing and the robust process of security guardrails so that we know what the AI is gonna say every time.”
For another example, see how iT360 built Gandalf, an internal AI chatbot for Waterware, or talk to iT360 about what an AI assistant could do for your business.
