The pitch is everywhere: "connect your catalog in a few hours." A webhook, two endpoints, a demo that handles "show me your running shoes." Sold.

Except the demo lies by omission. What you just wired up is keyword search with a voice.

A duct-taped RAG pipeline that matches strings and recites product sheets.

The assistant can answer. It can't advise. It lists. It doesn't recommend. And that difference shows up straight in your conversion rates.

The assistant can answer. It can't advise.

Duct-taped RAG is keyword search in disguise

A product API gives you access to data. Not to meaning. Ten thousand SKUs loaded raw into a language model are ten thousand rows of metadata.

Ask that system for "a light wine for a summer dinner" and it greps your descriptions for "light" and "summer." It doesn't understand you mean a low-tannin red, served cool, under €20.

The user asks a customer's question. They get a database's answer. They wanted advice; they got a list. That's where the conversational promise dies, politely, factually, one exchange at a time.

The user asks a customer's question. They get a database's answer.

What a real collection changes

At Scenaro, a connected catalog is called a collection. Shopify, Magento: synchronization is native, the catalog stays current. But the connection is only the starting point.

Every field in a collection can be indexed three ways: full-text for exact terms, semantic for meaning, not words, phonetic for what the ear actually hears. And it's configurable collection by collection, to fit your business.

The result: the agent doesn't match strings. It understands "a light wine for a summer dinner" and goes looking for what that means in your cellar. That's what runs in production at Club Français du Vin, our first client.

And when the request outgrows a product query, advanced search profiles take over. At Urbansider, the Paris travel concierge, the conversational experience doesn't return a list of addresses, it orchestrates the generation of an actual itinerary.

The API is the starting line, not the finish

Anyone can connect a catalog. Making an agent understand it, field by field, intent by intent, is architecture. That's what Scenaro builds.

Want to see how catalog indexing works on Scenaro? [Request a demo]