Most tools that promise to automate your store ask for the keys on day one. Connect, grant write access, switch it on, hope. If it gets something wrong, you find out from a customer.
We built StoreWorkers the other way round. Every worker you hire starts in shadow mode, and stays there for three days.
What shadow mode actually is
A worker in shadow mode does the entire job. The inventory guardian reads your stock and sales velocity every shift. The order worker reads every unfulfilled order and works out which ones are stuck. The catalogue worker reads every product and drafts the descriptions you are missing.
Then it stops. Nothing is written to your store. Instead, each shift ends with a short note in the work log: here is what I would have done, and why.
That note is the product for the first three days. You read it the way you would read a new hire's first report. Did they understand the job? Did they notice the right things? Would you have signed off on that reorder, that email, that description?
Why three days and not three minutes
A demo can show you a worker doing something clever once. It cannot show you what it does on a quiet Tuesday, or what it thinks "stuck" means for your particular fulfilment setup, or whether its idea of a risky order matches yours.
Three days is long enough to see a worker across a few real shifts, with your real orders and your real quiet spells. It is short enough that you are not paying for a trial you forgot about. During those three days the worker costs nothing.
What happens after
The worker is studying you as much as the store. Every proposal you approve or turn down teaches it how you decide, and it does not take a decision for you until it is sure of your pattern. When it is, it asks before going full auto on that kind of task. You say yes, or not, one kind of task at a time. You might let the inventory guardian send reorder emails on its own but keep stock adjustments behind your approval. You might let the support worker draft replies but never send them.
Every worker keeps a fixed list of things it can never do without asking, whatever you decide: cancel an order, change a price, delete a product or customer, refund without your yes, email your whole customer list, publish to your storefront. No setting, yours or ours, turns that list off.
The honest version of automation
We think the right question is not "how much can the AI do" but "how much of it have I actually watched do the job". Shadow mode gives you the watching. Graduation, one task type at a time, gives you the control. The fixed list gives you the floor.
If you would rather hand over the keys on day one, we are not the right tool. If you would rather hire someone, watch them for a few days, and then let them get on with it, that is exactly how this works.
