If you've gone looking for the Knowledge base app in your Shopify admin and found it in a different place, nothing is broken. Shopify moved the knowledge base into the admin itself on 26 October, and the standalone app is retiring in January 2027. The practical consequence for an Indian D2C store is narrower than the changelog suggests: you now have a native place to store the answers your support inbox repeats forty times a day, and you have roughly a fortnight before Diwali week to fill it with the ones that matter — delivery cutoffs, COD policy, exchange windows, GST invoices and serviceable pincodes.
Do that part first. The migration can wait until January; your festive support queue cannot.
Where the Shopify knowledge base lives in admin now
Use the admin search bar. Type "knowledge base" and go from there. That sounds like a dodge, but it's the honest answer: Shopify has reshuffled the left-hand navigation four or five times in the last two years, and any menu path we write down here has a decent chance of being wrong by February. Search is stable.
What you'll find is a plain list of articles with a title and a body. No theme, no storefront template, no URL. This is not a help centre you link customers to. It's a store of facts that Shopify's own assistant and shopping surfaces read from. If you want a public help page as well — and most stores with heavy COD volume should have one — that's still a separate job using pages or a help-centre app.
Access is admin-level, so whoever runs your support team needs a staff account with the right permission. We've seen stores where the one person who knows the actual return window is a contractor on a limited login. Fix that before you start writing.
The Knowledge Base app is being discontinued — here's what to do about it
If you installed the standalone Knowledge Base app, your content is not going to evaporate. The app retires in January 2027, which is a long runway by Shopify standards. But migrating from the Knowledge Base app is a copy-and-review job, not a technical one, and it's worth doing in one sitting rather than letting it hang over you for a year.
The review is the useful half. Open each existing article and ask whether it was true in the last quarter. Most knowledge bases we audit contain a shipping promise from two carrier contracts ago, a returns address for a warehouse the brand left, and a COD threshold that changed when the finance team got nervous about RTO. Paste the stale version into the new admin surface and you've just taught Shopify's assistant to lie to customers at scale.
Budget two hours. Rewrite as you move. Delete anything you can't verify.
What to put in a Shopify knowledge base before festive week
Start from your inbox, not from a template. Export the last 300 support conversations, sort by subject line, and you'll have your article list in about twenty minutes. For almost every Indian D2C store we work with, the same cluster comes out on top:
- Order-by dates for Diwali delivery, split by metro and non-metro, with the carrier named
- Whether COD is available on this order value, this pincode, this product
- How to check if a pincode is serviceable, and what happens if it isn't
- The exchange window and whether it extends for festive purchases
- How to get a GST invoice with a business GSTIN on it
- What the prepaid discount is and why it exists
- Tracking: where the link comes from, how long before it updates, what "in transit" means on day four
- Whether gift wrap or a gift note is possible and what it costs
- Size, care and material questions for your three best-selling SKUs
- Cancellation: before dispatch versus after
Ten articles. Nobody needs sixty. A knowledge base with sixty thin articles performs worse than one with ten precise ones, because the assistant has more ways to pick the wrong source.
COD and delivery answers carry most of the load
Cash on delivery is still a large share of orders for most Indian stores, and it brings a refusal rate with it. A knowledge base won't fix RTO on its own, but two articles move the needle more than people expect.
The first is a straight answer on COD eligibility. Write the actual rule: the order value ceiling, the categories excluded, the pincode conditions, the extra fee if you charge one. Vague COD copy generates a support ticket per order and a share of those turn into refusals at the door, because a customer who wasn't sure COD applied is a customer who wasn't sure about the purchase.
The second is the confirmation step. If you send a WhatsApp or IVR confirmation on COD orders before handing the shipment to Delhivery or Shiprocket, say so plainly, and say what happens if nobody responds. Customers who understand that an unanswered confirmation delays dispatch answer it.
On delivery, date everything. "We deliver in 3-5 days" is useless in the last week of October. Write "Order by 11 PM on 15 November for delivery before Diwali in Bengaluru, Mumbai, Delhi NCR, Hyderabad, Chennai and Pune. Tier-2 and tier-3 pincodes: order by 13 November." Then put a calendar reminder to change it the day after. A dated answer that's two weeks stale is worse than no answer, which is why most merchants avoid specifics — and why most merchants end up answering the same WhatsApp message two hundred times.
GST invoices, exchanges and the awkward cases
B2B buyers and anyone claiming input credit will ask for a GST invoice with their GSTIN. Write down whether you collect GSTIN at checkout, whether it can be added after the order is placed, and the cut-off after which it can't. If the answer is "email us and we'll reissue within 48 hours", say that. It's a worse policy than collecting it at checkout, but a clearly stated worse policy still beats silence.
Exchanges during a festive sale need their own article, because the rules usually differ from your standard policy. Discounted items on final sale? Say it. Exchange window extended to 30 days for anything bought in the sale window? Say that too, with the dates.
Name the awkward cases. If you ship from more than one location and the return address depends on which one fulfilled the order, that's exactly the kind of detail that produces a week of back-and-forth. Write it out. If you can't explain it in three sentences, the policy is probably the problem, not the article.
How the knowledge base shapes AI shopping answers and agentic channels
This is the part that changes the calculation. Shopify's direction of travel is clear enough: shopping assistants and agentic surfaces answering buyer questions without the buyer ever landing on a collection page. Those systems need facts about your store that aren't in the product catalogue. Shipping cutoffs, COD rules and return windows don't live in a product record. The knowledge base is where Shopify has decided they belong.
Which means the quality bar is different from a help-centre page. An AI shopping answer is extracted, not read. Write short declarative sentences with the specific number in them. "Returns accepted within 15 days of delivery" extracts cleanly. "We want you to love your purchase, so we offer a generous returns policy" extracts into nothing, and the assistant will either skip it or guess.
A few habits that help: one topic per article; the answer in the first sentence; exact numbers rather than ranges where you can commit; no marketing voice. If you already produce content for search, this is a different craft. Search content persuades a human who is scanning. Knowledge base content feeds a machine that is quoting you to a customer who may never see your site.
One boundary worth drawing: the knowledge base answers policy questions, not product-selection questions. Nobody should be asking it which kurta sets are under ₹2,000 in cotton. That's a catalogue navigation problem, and on a large catalogue it's solved with proper filters and on-site search — our own FilterPro does that job if your theme's default filtering is giving up at 400 SKUs.
What deflection is actually worth: the arithmetic
Take a store doing 150 orders a day in September. Festive week runs at roughly 3x, so 450 a day. Assume one support contact per nine orders — that's 17 tickets a day before the peak and 50 during it.
In our experience the "where is my order / will it arrive by Diwali / is COD available here" cluster is about half of festive volume. Call it 25 tickets a day. If precise, dated answers in the knowledge base absorb 40% of that cluster, you've removed 10 tickets a day. Across a 12-day peak, 120 tickets. At six minutes each including context-switching, that's 12 hours of an agent's time.
Twelve hours is not transformational. It's also roughly the cost of one person's festive overtime, recovered by an afternoon of writing. And the second-order effect is larger: the customer who got an instant, correct cutoff date at 11 PM didn't abandon the cart, and the COD buyer who understood the confirmation call didn't refuse the parcel.
Do this in the next fortnight
Pull your last 300 tickets. Pick the ten questions that repeat. Write each answer in under 120 words with the real numbers in it, including the Diwali order-by dates per zone. Put a reminder in the calendar to update the dated ones on 1 December and again before your end-of-season sale.
If your existing content is sitting in the old app, move it in January and rewrite as you go. If you'd rather have someone go through the inbox, the policies and the admin setup with you, our free store audit covers it, and if you're nearby, the Bengaluru team will do it over a call.