Shopify Inc. today announced the debut of a virtual employee called Kit for its virtual stores.

Shopify provides e-commerce solutions, which are essentially virtual stores that deliver an online presence for merchants. Shopify’s Kit extends the metaphor of the virtual store by adding something that was missing for merchants before: someone to hire the moment they open their store. Best of all, this employee works for free.

“Every brick-and-mortar store that you walk into has people behind the counter,” Michael Perry, the director of Kit at Shopify, told SiliconANGLE about the software. “Even the smallest coffee shop has people there providing the service.”

As a provider of e-commerce solutions, essentially virtual stores that provide an online presence for merchants, Shopify hopes that the addition of a free virtual employee to sit “behind the counter” will bolster that capability.

As a virtual employee, really a sophisticated bot that runs behind the scenes, Kit works for merchants by automating tasks – marketing, advertising and other duties – through text conversations. Merchants can chat with Kit via Simple Message Service, Facebook Messenger and Telegram.

To act more like an employee, rather than a chatbot that takes orders, Kit proactively offers to do jobs for the employer. An example conversation might start with Kit opening up a message saying, “Good morning, I see some new products have been added to our store. Should we showcase five new products in a Facebook ad and generate some traffic?”

From there the Shopify user could reply in the affirmative and then Kit would take the user through a sequence of questions on how to prepare the ad spread.

Currently, Kit can manage and operate ad campaigns on both Facebook and Instagram. The virtual employee’s capabilities also extend to e-mail marketing campaigns and Kit can even automate “thank you” e-mails to customers in order to solicit feedback from purchases and visitors.

Just like other employees, Kit can learn new skills and do new things. Since Kit is software, these skills use the language of software development and are supplied as applications and integrations. By integrating SEO Manager, Kit can use search engine optimization; with Bold, Kit can create discounts and store sales; adding Yotpo Reviews, Kit can make use of customer reviews in marketing. Kit can even automate accounting tasks with Sufio automated invoices.

Shopify acquired Kit in 2016. Since then, Kit went from servicing customers in 30 countries to 175 and added the Facebook Messenger capability. With Kit merchants drew in five times more customers to their stores than the previous year. To date, Kit has had more than 3 million conversations with Shopify merchants.

The language Kit’s developers use is carefully designed to talk about Kit like a person, an actual employee. Merchants “hire” Kit as an employee instead of “launching” it like an application. The name “Kit” itself is gender-neutral, and people who work with the software sometimes refer to Kit as “she” or “he” when talking about conversations.

Kit’s name arises from a variety of sources. The car from the TV show Knight Rider – KITT, aka Knight Industries Three Thousand – is not one of them. The name arises from two origins.

The first, Perry mentioned his father worked in the automotive industry and cars often came with “performance kits” used to enhance the vehicle. The second comes from an acronym, “Keep In Touch,” and thus Kit’s name is also a nod to the beginning of the customer retention industry.

“The important thing about making Kit free is that it opens up the capabilities of Kit to a lot more people,” Perry said. He added that it fits in very nicely with Shopify’s mission statement of leveling the playing field for entrepreneurs and merchants by making it easy to open and run online stores.

In short, by offering Kit for free to Shopify merchants, not only can they “open stores” and get one running out of the box, but they are also being given the chance to immediately hire an employee to assist with that shop.

As of today, Kit is available for free to all of Shopify’s 400,000 merchants. The basic Shopify service starts at $29 per month, the standard version $79 per month and the advanced runs $299 per month.

Image: Shopify