The Meatery
Voice AI CRM scaled into a multi-tenant agency platform for The Meatery
An AI voice agent that recovers abandoned carts on Shopify
The Meatery is a premium DTC Wagyu brand on Shopify. Abandoned checkouts and lapsed customers convert best over a live phone call, but a human call team costs too much to staff. We built a voice AI system where an agent calls customers, looks up their live cart, and sends a real discount code mid-call, with do-not-call and calling-hours compliance on every outbound call.
Industry
E-commerce & Food Distribution
Client
Premium meat distributor
Engagement
Multi-tenant agency architecture & voice AI
Outcome
Multi-tenant agency MVP with DNC compliance
Tech Stack
React, Node.js, Express, Shopify API, Retell AI, n8n, PostgreSQL
A look inside the live platform — scroll to explore →
Can an AI voice agent take real actions during a phone call?
Yes. The Retell-hosted agent calls a custom tool server mid-call. It looks up the live Shopify cart, creates a real discount code, and triggers Klaviyo SMS or email while the customer is still on the phone.
Agents can also create discounted draft orders and text checkout links during the call itself. The customer does not wait for a follow-up email. The offer lands while they are still talking.
How does AI abandoned cart recovery work on Shopify?
The system runs three campaign types: prospecting, abandoned checkout recovery, and win-back of lapsed customers. Shopify is the source of truth, so the agent speaks from real cart contents and order history, not a stale export.
Conversions are attributed to the day the call happened, within a 7-day window for prospecting and abandoned checkout calls and 30 days for win-back. That keeps reporting honest about what the calls actually earn.
How do you keep automated outbound calling compliant?
Every outbound call is gated by do-not-call checks against global and client-specific exclusion lists. No number gets dialed before it passes.
A shared library also enforces a hard 9am to 8pm local-time calling window, applied identically across all four call-initiation code paths. Compliance is built into the platform, not left to per-call discretion.
How do you stop an AI voice agent from making things up?
We use a deterministic-first design. The server supplies real product, cart, and order data, and the LLM only drives the conversation.
Discount codes and checkout links come from the Shopify API, so the model does not fabricate product links or offers. The storefront Concierge follows the same rule and returns exactly three real, in-stock product recommendations with clickable links.
How does a voice AI system get smarter over time?
Call transcripts are mined for objections and rebuttals, which feed the agents' knowledge base. Objection-handling knowledge that used to live in people's heads is captured and reused.
An n8n and AI judge workflow lets the team review recordings and improve prompts and tone. One cleanup pass cut the inbound agent prompt by roughly 83 percent, from 30,000 plus characters to about 5,000.
What tech stack does an AI voice CRM use?
Two services share Shopify as the source of truth. A Next.js 14 dashboard with about 90 Prisma and Postgres models handles margins, campaigns, call logs, and the DNC list, deployed on Railway with native cron jobs.
A standalone Express service exposes the tool endpoints Retell agents call live mid-conversation, plus post-call webhook ingestion with multi-signal voicemail detection. Klaviyo, n8n, OpenAI, and Claude round out the stack.
Can AI give real-time margin visibility on Shopify?
Yes. Shopify cost data lags actual vendor costs, so margins were invisible in real time. The dashboard adds custom cost overrides, pricing experiments, and ad analytics so the team sees true margin, not last month's guess.
Vendor PDF invoices used to be transcribed by hand. AI-assisted invoice extraction with resumable processing removed that manual data entry.
Is voice AI a fit for high-AOV DTC brands?
It fits brands where abandoned checkouts and lapsed customers convert best over a live phone call, but a human call team costs too much to staff and scale. The Meatery is a premium Wagyu brand on Shopify with exactly that shape.
We backfilled 11,000 plus historical calls from Retell to seed the CRM, so campaigns started with real call history instead of an empty database.
Business Impact
The platform is now structured to recover revenue while maintaining the controls that an agency deployment needs.
0%
Compliance-aware
DNC checks before outbound actions
0x
Faster launch
Campaigns move from days to minutes
0 platform
Shared system
Voice, CRM, and automation in one stack
0/7
Coverage
Continuous revenue recovery support
Frequently asked questions
Quick answers about the voice AI, compliance, and how the platform works.