Inside its new innovation store, the company is piloting Shoppe Advisor, an AI-powered discovery tool designed to bring together digital insight and in-store expertise. For years, supplement shopping has relied on either knowledgeable staff or online content, rarely both at the same time. According to Uman Chan, principal director, customer experience technology at The Vitamin Shoppe, the tool aims to close that gap, strengthening consumer education while elevating the in-store experience.
“And then online, we also had all this great content, blog articles, expert articles and also videos that we’re not able to service effectively in the store,” he said. “So Shop Advisor was really designed to bridge that gap and bring that to life so that when a Health Enthusiast (HE) is helping a customer in a store, they’re able to leverage this as a conversational tool.”
That conversational tool plays a major role in Shop Advisor – the centerpiece of the store. The AI-driven platform connects product discovery, education and real-time inventory, bringing an e-commerce-style experience into a brick-and-mortar setting.
“This is where we’re not reinventing the wheel,” Chan said. “So we have a lot of the great content that’s traditionally on the digital channels and we have a lot of the digital technology that’s powering all the systems already. By putting together all this information in a new way, in a way that makes sense over the store format, we’re able to service this experience to the customer so that they can deepen their knowledge and desire.”
Rather than simply recommending products, the idea is to go beyond suggestions and actually understand what the customer is looking to accomplish.
“What we’re trying to do is understand what the customer’s intent is, similar to the experience that you would get when you talk to a health enthusiast,” he said. “They don’t just hand you a product but they will come and talk to you, have a conversation, listen to you, understand what your intent is, understand what you’re trying to accomplish and then help you accordingly. So Shoppe Advisor is modeled after that same concept so that the customer can be using the Shoppe Advisor either by themselves, when the HE is either busy or maybe they don’t want to talk to someone yet or alongside with the HE so that they can also have it as a conversational piece, as a content so that they can both refer to it. That really deepens the conversation.”
The experience was also designed specifically for the in-store environment with usability and convenience in mind.
“The UX [user experience] is actually built on the ground up with the store in mind. From the size of the tiles to the content, we want it to be very precise and according to what the customer needs,” he said.
Recognizing that customers may not want to linger at a kiosk to read long articles or watch videos, Shoppe Advisor can generate a QR code on demand—allowing them to scan and continue exploring content on their own device. At the same time, customers also have the option to engage in-store, reflecting a series of deliberate design choices aimed at making the experience more personalized and intuitive.
The tool is designed to understand a shopper’s needs in the moment without collecting or tracking personal information, prioritizing real-time intent over identity and delivering guidance without requiring personal data input.
“They’re standing in a store in front of a kiosk, right? You don’t necessarily want to have your personal information just sitting out there,” he said.
After three months in store, initial feedback is offering a clearer picture of how shoppers are choosing to use the technology in real time.
“One of the things that is actually very refreshing to learn is that while we designed the Shoppe Advisor to be used either standalone as self-serve or as a collaboration tool with an HE, most of the time the customer is actually using it alongside with the HE,” Chan said. “This is a really good example of what we strive to do, which is to have technology really deepen that human connection rather than working around it. So it’s not to replace the conversation, but it’s really to deepen the conversation. So that’s something that we’ve seen and we’re really happy to see.”
