Do I need to be technical to use this?
No. You give us your web address and you get back a plain description of what happened, written so you can forward it to whoever looks after your website. You do not have to understand the fix to ask for it.
How it works
How Ottom works
People are starting to ask an AI assistant to find and buy things for them. When that happens, the assistant comes to your shop instead of the customer. It cannot see your shop the way a person does. It can only use what your pages actually say.
What we actually do
Five steps, and you only do the first one.
Somebody else is doing the shopping now
The customer is still a person. The thing that arrives at your website is software, and it is working from the words on the page rather than the look of it.
What it can and cannot take from a page
This is the part that surprises people. A page can be clear and attractive to a customer and almost blank to software. If the price is inside a picture, the software does not have a price. If the sizes only appear when you move a mouse over them, it has no sizes.
A purchase has four stages, and it can stop at any of them
Finding your product. Working out whether it fits what was asked for. Comparing it with the alternatives. Then buying it. Most stores are fine for two or three of these and stop at the fourth, which is why a general health score is not much use: the useful answer is which one, and what it was looking at.
What a stall actually is
A stall is the point where the agent stops making progress. It is not an error on your site and it will not appear anywhere in your reports. Nothing breaks, nothing gets logged, and no one emails you. The agent simply moves on to another shop.
What happens, step by step
- You give us your web address
Nothing to install, no account on your store, no code to add. If we can reach your shop, we can scan it.
- An agent goes shopping
It looks for a product the way an assistant would, reads what your pages say about it, then tries to buy it.
- It stops at the payment step, on purpose
It never enters card details and never places an order. Reaching payment proves the path works; going through it would cost you money.
- You get a report
Which of the four stages it got through, where it stopped, what it was looking at when it stopped, and what to change.
What we never do
- We never enter card details and never place an order.
- We never pretend to be a real customer. Our agent says who it is on every visit, and that page tells you how to recognise it and how to opt out.
- We never scan a shop more often than our published limit, however many people ask. Why the limit belongs to the store.
Frequently asked questions
Will this place real orders or cost me money?
No. The agent goes as far as the payment step and stops there. No card details are entered and no order is placed, on any plan. That is a rule in the software rather than a setting you have to check.
Will it slow my store down?
No. A scan is a handful of visits, not a flood. We also cap how often any one shop is scanned, counted across everybody who asks rather than per person, so nobody can point a crowd at your store through us.
How is this different from a website checker?
A checker reads your code and compares it to a list. It can tell you a field is missing. It cannot tell you whether anybody could actually buy something, because it never tries. We try, and the answer is either yes or the exact place it stopped.
What if my store is fine?
Then you get a report that says so, and a record of the date it was true. Stores change: themes update, apps get added, and the assistants themselves change. That is why the paid plans watch rather than check once.
Scan your store, free, once. If you want to know why any of this is worth your time, read why it matters. For exactly what a scan covers and what it leaves alone, read what a scan does, and what it does not do.