Hardware Store Support Chat

Problem

I wanted a portfolio piece showing a support chatbot doing the boring parts properly, not just a chat box wired to a model. Most demos I tried would happily invent a refund policy if you asked for one. Article 50 of the EU AI Act came into effect this August and says people have to be told when they are talking to an AI, and almost none of them did that either.

What I built

A single page with a fake storefront and a support chat panel next to it, backed by an n8n workflow. A message goes to a webhook, gets checked by a guardrails step, then reaches an agent that searches the store's policy documents in Supabase before it answers. The agent is told to answer only from what it finds, so when the policy is not there it says so and gives you a support email instead of guessing. Off-topic messages never reach the agent at all — a separate branch sends back a short refusal. I specced it out and wrote the code with Claude Code.

Tech used

• n8n
• Supabase
• OpenAI API

Result

It runs locally and answers policy questions from 83 chunks of store documentation — shipping thresholds, return windows, warranty terms — without inventing any of it. Ask it for a lasagne recipe and you get a polite refusal, which was the point.