The Vortex IQ onboarding flow is the bridge between signup and your first useful session in the AI OS. It is short by design: five steps, each one click or one form, and you land on the Nerve Centre with live data and the first audit findings on screen. The whole flow typically takes 5 to 10 minutes for a well-prepared merchant — the slowest step is usually the first connector OAuth grant if your store admin password requires a fresh login.Documentation Index
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Before you start
A short pre-flight list:- Have your store admin login ready. For Shopify, BigCommerce, and Adobe Commerce you need to sign in to your store during the OAuth step.
- Pick the right work email. The email you signed up with is the one team members look up when they want to be invited later.
- Block out 10 minutes. The flow is fast, but doing it while context-switching with a meeting open is more painful than it needs to be.
- Have one specific question in mind. “I want to know whether my paid traffic is converting” or “I want to fix my product page SEO” is a better lens than “let me see what this thing does”. Onboarding is more useful when you arrive with a question.
The five onboarding steps
Step 1 — Interest selection
The first step asks: what areas of your business do you want the AI OS to focus on first? After signup, the wizard opens with the headline Tell us your interests and a six-tile grid. Each tile has an icon, a label, and a checkbox.
Tick the areas that matter to you, or click Select all — picking everything is a reasonable default for a single-brand owner who wears every hat. Click Continue when done.Your selection influences five things:
| Area | What it covers |
|---|---|
| Sales | Revenue, conversion rate, average order value, returning customer rate, payment performance, refunds |
| Marketing | Ad spend efficiency, campaign performance, email engagement, attribution, audience health |
| Inventory | Stock levels, stockout risk, slow-moving SKUs, restock cadence, fulfilment status |
| Customer behaviour | Lifetime value, churn risk, segment performance, journey friction, repeat-purchase patterns |
| Operations | Site uptime, Core Web Vitals, incident response, infrastructure cost, ticket volume |
| Analytics | Traffic sources, funnel analysis, cohort analysis, attribution models, custom dashboards |
- The connector tile order on the next step (Sales + Inventory surfaces commerce platforms first; Marketing + Analytics surfaces ad and analytics platforms first)
- Which Nerve Centre tab opens first on your dashboard
- Which agents appear at the top of the AI agent library
- Which Vortex Mind reports are pre-scheduled (e.g. picking Sales schedules the Daily Revenue Leakage briefing)
- Which Ask Viq prompt cards appear on the welcome screen
Step 2 — Connect your first source
This is the step that turns Vortex IQ from a marketing demo into your AI OS. Until you connect at least one source, the dashboards are empty templates. The moment a connector lands, the connector graph starts populating, the watch tower goes live, and the first audit fires automatically.The screen shows a featured tiles row (Shopify, BigCommerce, Adobe Commerce), a search field, and a category browser. The featured tiles cover roughly 80% of merchant signups. If your platform is not in the row, type its name in the search field — all 215 connectors are searchable.Connecting Shopify
- Click the Shopify tile.
- Enter your store URL as
your-store-name.myshopify.comin the modal. - Click Connect. A pop-up opens at your Shopify admin.
- Sign in to Shopify (if not already signed in) and review the requested read scopes: products, orders, customers, inventory, analytics, and theme metadata.
- Click Install app. The pop-up closes and you see a green Connected badge.
- Click the BigCommerce tile.
- Enter your store hash (the alphanumeric string after
/stores/in your BigCommerce admin URL). - Click Connect, sign in to BigCommerce in the pop-up, and approve the OAuth scopes.
- Click the Adobe Commerce tile.
- Enter your API base URL (typically
https://your-store.com/rest/V1/) and an Admin token generated from your Magento admin under System → Integrations. - Click Connect. Vortex IQ verifies with a test API call.
- Search for NetSuite (ERP category) and click the tile.
- Enter your Account ID, Consumer key, Consumer secret, Token ID, and Token secret from a NetSuite TBA (token-based authentication) setup.
- Click Connect.
You can navigate away from the connector screen — the pull runs in the background. Use the time to configure an alert channel in Settings → Alerts, or to invite a teammate from Settings → Account → Team Members.
Step 3 — Configure your first AI agent
The third step tells the AI OS what to work on first. It picks the first AI workload, sets up your first Profile for Ask Viq, and establishes human-in-the-loop approval defaults.Pick your first AI workloadThe screen shows recommended agents based on your interest selection and the connector you just wired. The recommended agents by connector:
Click the recommended agent to deploy it. Deploying an agent is configuration, not server setup — the agent record is created in your workspace, scoped to the connector you wired, with default schedule and approval gates.Deployed agents monitor relevant signal continuously and react to data changes. When an agent finds something worth your attention, a finding lands on the Kanban board. High-impact actions — anything that modifies your live store, sends customer communications, changes ad-platform configuration, or triggers a billing event — require your one-click approval before they execute.Set up your first ProfileA Profile is a saved set of connectors that Ask Viq queries against. The wizard pre-populates a default Profile based on the connector you just wired (for example, connecting Shopify creates a profile named Shopify containing the Shopify connector). This is the profile that appears in the Ask Viq dropdown on day one.As you connect more sources later, you can either add them to the existing Profile or create new Profiles for different roles (e.g. a Finance Profile with Stripe + the commerce platform; a Marketing Profile with GA4 + Google Ads + Klaviyo). Profiles are managed at Settings → Profiles.Brand voice and AI Guardrails (optional)At the end of step 3, the wizard briefly surfaces two AI configuration options with a Set up later default:
| Connector connected | Recommended first agent | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Shopify, BigCommerce, Adobe Commerce | Store Audit Agent | Runs the full 50+ check sweep and produces findings on the Kanban board |
| Google Ads | Paid Traffic Waste Agent | Identifies wasted ad spend on out-of-stock SKUs, broad-match leakage, and low-performing keywords |
| Google Analytics 4 | Conversion Funnel Agent | Surfaces the biggest funnel drop-offs from session start to purchase |
| Stripe / PayPal | Decline Recovery Agent | Identifies declined transactions worth recovering, segmented by decline reason |
| Klaviyo / Dotdigital | Customer Recovery Agent | Surfaces customers worth re-engaging with segment recommendations |
| Datadog / New Relic | Incident Awareness Agent | Connects monitoring incidents to revenue impact through the connector graph |
- Brand Voice Profile — defines the tone the AI uses when generating content. The four preset tones are Friendly, Technical, Premium, and Casual; you can also define a custom voice.
- Forbidden words / phrases — words the AI must never use in generated content. The default list is empty.
Step 4 — Dashboard tour
Once your first connector has landed and the data pull is underway, the Nerve Centre opens with live cards. The layout has four main zones:
The sidebar is the navigation spine of the AI OS. From top to bottom: Nerve Centre, Vortex Mind, Ask Viq, Actions, Vortex Apps, Vortex Memory — then Get Support, Settings, and Log Out. The active page is highlighted with a violet accent.The tab bar shows one tab per connector category. With Shopify connected, you see All (a blended overview) and a Shopify tab. New tabs appear as you connect more sources.The card grid shows KPI tiles, each with a title, current value, trend sparkline, and sentiment colour (green / amber / red). Hero cards occupy the top 3 to 5 slots per tab; for Shopify those are typically Total revenue, Conversion rate, Average order value, Cart abandonment, and New vs returning customer split. Click any card to open its detail view with full history, segmentation, and anomaly markers.The activity rail holds real-time anomaly alerts (colour-coded by severity), a timeline of recent agent activity, and a quick Ask Viq chat box.The Profile dropdown lives at the top of the Ask Viq panel (and in a compact form on the Nerve Centre top bar). Pick a Profile to scope every Ask Viq question to a specific set of connectors. The first Profile was auto-created during step 3.Recommended first clicks:
| Zone | Location | Purpose |
|---|---|---|
| Sidebar | Left edge, full height | Navigation across the six modules and platform settings |
| Tab bar | Across the top of the workspace | Connector tabs (Shopify, GA4, Ads, etc.) plus an All overview |
| Card grid | Centre, main reading area | KPI cards on the active tab, organised by hero and standard tiers |
| Activity rail | Right edge | Alerts, recent agent activity, Ask Viq quick chat |
- Click the connector tab (e.g. Shopify) and watch KPI cards populate.
- Click any card with a green or red sentiment colour to open its detail view.
- Click alerts in the activity rail if any have fired.
- Click Actions in the sidebar — by now the first Store Audit run should be complete or near-complete.
- Click Ask Viq, pick the default Profile, and try: “How is my conversion rate this week?”
- Click Settings for a look around — especially Connected Sources, Profiles, and Alerts.
Step 5 — Continue into normal use
After the four wizard steps, the platform is yours. Three things happen automatically in the background:
- Vortex Mind starts watching. The diagnostic engine is on by default; anomaly detection is live from the moment the first data pull completes.
- Vortex Memory is initialised. A blank workspace memory is created so reports, audits, and knowledge files land in a known place.
- The Daily Morning briefing schedule starts. The first daily briefing email schedules for the next morning so your second day begins with a curated read.
Skipping onboarding steps
You can skip any step if you want to look around first:- Skip interest selection — click Skip for now. The Nerve Centre defaults to a balanced layout. You can pick interests later from Settings → Account → Your Profile.
- Skip first connector — click I will connect later. The Nerve Centre opens with empty cards. No real numbers appear until at least one connector is wired.
- Skip first agent — click Set up later. The Store Audit Agent does not deploy automatically; you can deploy it from Vortex Apps or the AI agent library at any time.
- Skip dashboard tour — always optional. Dismiss it and explore on your own.
How onboarding differs for agencies
Both account types walk the same five-step flow with two small differences for agencies:- Step 2 (first connector) is one connector for merchants. For agencies, the first connector belongs to the pilot client. Additional clients (each their own scoped workspace) can be added after onboarding completes.
- Step 3 (first agent) for agencies includes the option to set up the agency’s branding (logo, colour scheme) on the agency-wide brand voice profile so client-facing reports carry the agency’s identity.
What onboarding does not do
- No credit card is collected. Billing details are captured only when you choose to upgrade from the free starting tier.
- No data is sent anywhere. Onboarding is read-only on your store. The only writes are inside Vortex IQ — saving your interest selection, your connector credentials, and your first Profile.
- No plan is picked. You stay on the free starting tier until you choose to upgrade. You can run the audit, read findings, and try Ask Viq without committing to anything.