Create Your Own Sales Skills for Any Shopper Behavior

Rep AI comes with a library of built-in Sales Skills for the most common shopping moments. Custom Sales Skills let you go further and build your own: you decide exactly which shopper behavior starts the conversation, what the AI should try to achieve, who sees it, and when.

What is a Custom Sales Skill?

A custom Sales Skill has two halves:

• A trigger — the shopper behavior that sets it off, such as viewing three products without adding anything to the cart, spending two minutes on a page, or reaching a cart total you choose.
• An AI goal — a plain-language description of what you want the AI to do when that moment arrives. The AI reads your goal, looks at what the shopper is actually browsing, and holds a real conversation rather than reciting a script.

You build both in a guided wizard, and your skill appears in the Sales Skills grid next to the built-in skills, marked with a CUSTOM badge.

Benefits

• Target the moments that matter to your store. Your shoppers don't behave like everyone else's, and your skills don't have to either.
• Describe the goal, not the script. You write what you want to achieve in your own words, and the AI adapts the wording to each shopper.
• Launch without waiting. You create, preview, and activate a skill yourself, in minutes.
• See what it earned. Every custom skill reports its own approaches, engagement, orders, and revenue.

Before You Start

• You can hold up to 10 custom skills at a time. The Add new skill card shows your current count.
• Triggers based on cart value or cart items require an active Shopify integration. They're unavailable on the trigger list and their templates are greyed out until Shopify is connected.

How to Create a Custom Sales Skill

Go to AI Sales → Sales Skills and click the Add new skill card at the start of the grid. It shows how many of your ten you've used.

Step 1: Choose a template, or start from scratch

The wizard opens on Choose template, with six ready-made starting points:

Every template is a starting point — you can change anything in it. If you'd rather define the moment yourself, choose Build Custom Trigger (Advanced).

Step 2: Trigger — decide when the skill fires

Add one or more conditions, and choose whether the skill fires when ALL of them are met or when ANY of them are met. The link on the right of the panel switches between the two.

Available conditions:

Several conditions offer a comparison — greater than, less than, equals and similar — so you can set thresholds precisely.

As you build, a TRIGGER SUMMARY below the conditions restates your rule in plain English. Read it before moving on; it's the quickest way to catch a rule that doesn't say what you meant.

One thing worth knowing about ALL: when you require several conditions together, the AI looks for them in the order you've listed them. Put the condition that happens first in a shopper's visit at the top.

Step 3: AI Goal — decide what the AI does

When you write your own Approach Message, shoppers see it exactly as you typed it. When you let the AI generate it, the opener is written fresh for each shopper based on your AI Goal.

Step 4: Targeting — decide who sees it

Page Targeting — show the skill on All pages, or on specific page types: Home, Product (PDP), Collection, Cart. You can also target a Custom URL such as /collections/sale.

Audience filters — narrow by:

• Visitor type: All, New only, or Returning only
• Device: All, Desktop, or Mobile
• Traffic source: All, or specific sources such as google, facebook
• Geography: All, or specific countries such as US, Canada

For traffic source and geography you can list several values separated by commas, and any one of them will match. Geography accepts country names or codes (US, USA, United States all work) — list individual countries rather than regions.

Step 5: Timing — decide how often, and review

• Delay — how many seconds to wait after the trigger conditions are met before the AI speaks. The default is 15 seconds.
• Frequency — Once per session, Once per day, or Once ever per shopper.
• Priority — Low, Normal, or High. When several of your custom skills match the same moment, the higher-priority one speaks.
• Review — a summary table of the skill, trigger, pages, audience, and frequency, with an Edit link back to any step.

Activate immediately after saving is ticked by default. Click Finish to create the skill.

Preview Before You Launch

On the final step, Preview Conversation opens your storefront in a new tab and shows you the skill in action. Previewing saves the skill in a paused state first, so nothing goes live until you finish the wizard.

Note that preview always shows your skill, while a normal visit to your store may not: a share of shopper sessions are held back for A/B measurement, and proactive skills stay hidden for the whole of those sessions. If a skill doesn't appear on your own browse-through, that's the most likely reason — use Preview to confirm the skill itself is working.

Managing Your Custom Skills

Each custom skill card gives you:

• A toggle to turn the skill on or off. A paused skill keeps all its settings and simply stops speaking to shoppers.
• Settings to reopen the wizard and change anything.
• Duplicate to copy a skill as a starting point. The copy is named "… (copy)" and starts paused so you can adjust it first.
• Delete to remove it permanently. This can't be undone.

Cards also show performance over the last 30 days — Approaches, Engaged, Orders, and Revenue. An active skill that hasn't fired recently shows "No triggers in the last 7 days", which usually means the trigger conditions are stricter than your traffic.

How Custom Skills Work Alongside Built-In Skills

• Only one proactive message appears per page load, so shoppers are never crowded.
• When a custom skill and a built-in skill both match the same moment, your custom skill speaks. Among several matching custom skills, your High/Normal/Low priority decides.
• Built-in Sales Skills continue to run everywhere a custom skill doesn't apply.

Best Practices

1. Start from a template. The six templates cover the highest-value moments and take seconds to adapt.
2. Read the Trigger Summary out loud. If it doesn't describe the shopper you pictured, fix the conditions before saving.
3. Be specific in the AI Goal. "Help the shopper pick between our two bestselling serums and mention free shipping over $50" produces far better conversations than "help the shopper".
4. Give the shopper a beat. A short delay after the trigger feels like attentive service; an instant message feels like a pop-up.
5. Use Once per session for most skills. Reserve Once ever for messages that only make sense one time, like a first-visit welcome offer.
6. Launch one skill at a time. Give each a week of traffic before adding the next, so the performance numbers tell you something clean.

Troubleshooting

My skill isn't appearing when I browse my store.

• Some sessions are held back for A/B measurement and show no proactive skills at all. Use Preview Conversation to check the skill itself.
• Check the skill is toggled on, and that your own visit actually matches the trigger, page targeting, and audience filters.
• If the frequency is Once per session or Once ever, you may have already used it up — start a fresh session.
• Only one proactive message shows per page load, so another skill may have spoken first.

I can't add another skill.

• You're at the 10-skill maximum. Delete a skill you no longer use, or pause and repurpose one with Settings.

The cart value condition isn't available.

• Cart value and cart items require an active Shopify integration.

My value was rejected.

• Enter numbers only: 75, not 75%; 120, not 120s; 50, not $50 with extra formatting. Whole numbers are required for counts like pages viewed and cart items.

My skill fires less often than I expected with several conditions.

• With ALL, conditions are matched in the order you listed them. Reorder them so the earliest behavior in a visit comes first, or switch to ANY if the conditions don't need to happen in sequence.

The cart value threshold behaves differently for international shoppers.

• Cart value is compared against the cart total as the shopper sees it. If you sell in multiple currencies, a threshold of 50 means 50 in the shopper's own currency.

Related Features

• Boost Your Conversion Rates with AI-Powered Sales Skills — the built-in skill library and how proactive engagement works overall.
• Streamline Customer Service with AI-Powered Support Skills — the equivalent for support conversations.