The name

Decided 2026-09-28. Internal working name. Not cleared for a domain purchase, a trademark filing or a marketplace listing.

The product is called Store Deputy, because a deputy acts with the owner's authority — which is the product.

Why a "deputy"

The word does two jobs at once. It says the agent is merchant-side (a shop has a deputy; a shopper does not), and it says the agent acts rather than advises. Both were the things every other candidate lost.

What the search actually showed

About thirty candidate names and forty domains were checked. Two patterns came out of it, and they are worth keeping because they will recur at every future rename:

1. The second half of a compound decides the agent's rank. -mate, -aid, -book, -watch, -pal and -helper all demote the product to an assistant, which throws away its only real distinction. Halves that keep agency: -wright, -keeper, -master, -hand, -reeve, -warden, -deputy.

2. Specificity buys availability. Every short dictionary word in .ai is registered — most to parking pages. The descriptive compounds were free precisely because no squatter can resell them. storedeputy.ai was free at the registry when this was written.

Names rejected for a collision in the same market, as examples of the failure mode:

• fosho — FOSHO AI builds "autonomous AI marketing agents" for merchants. The same sentence as our pitch.
• Shopio — a ten-year-old shop platform. Naming ourselves after one would have told buyers we compete with OpenCart.
• CartWatch — a live Shopify bot-detection app, and "watch" is passive anyway.

The caveat, stated plainly

Deputy.com is a large workforce-management company selling to retail — the same buyer, an adjacent shelf. The string "Store Deputy" is free and an internal name needs no clearance, so this does not block anything today.

It bites on the way out. Before a domain, a trademark or a listing, get it checked. And expect people to shorten it to "Deputy" in speech, which walks straight into the collision — decide the short form deliberately rather than discovering it.

Alternatives kept on file

ShopOwl was the runner-up: one image carrying both wisdom and working at night, with an active verb (an owl hunts). It was rejected only because it does not tell a shop owner what the product does. shopowl.ai, storeowl.ai, cartowl.ai and owlkeep.ai were free at the time of writing.

Also free as names, if a rename is ever needed: Cartwright, Kontor, Chandler, Steelyard.