Support chat on a shop is fine. It is not where the value is. The value is that shoppers do not know your category names — they describe what they need, and an assistant can turn that description into products in a way your filters cannot.
The problem with shop navigation
Someone who wants “a good chair for working at a computer all day” has to translate that into your taxonomy: Office → Chairs → filter by ergonomic → sort by rating. Every step loses people. An assistant skips the translation.
What a good shopping assistant does
- Recommends real products with image, current price, sale price and stock — read from the catalog at the moment of the answer, not from anything the model remembers.
- Explains why each one fits, and names a best pick with a reason.
- Compares two or three of them on the attributes that actually differ, rather than dumping every spec.
- Handles follow-ups: “under 200”, “the second one”, “in black”, “show me cheaper”.
- Adds to the cart and hands over to your normal checkout.
The part that has to be right
Prices and stock must come from the shop, never from the language model. A chatbot that quotes a price from a paragraph it read last week will eventually quote one you no longer offer, and in most of Europe an advertised price is not a triviality.
The same goes for which products exist. An assistant should only be able to choose from the products your catalog returned for that question — anything else is an invitation to invent a product that fits the request perfectly and does not exist.
What it will not do
- Replace your product photography or your descriptions. It works from what you wrote.
- Fix a catalog with missing attributes. If nothing records which chairs have armrests, it cannot filter by armrests.
- Handle payment. The checkout stays your checkout, with your taxes, shipping and payment plugins.
Questions
Does it work with variable products?
It should. Ours lists the real variations and adds the one the shopper picked, because “add the blue one in large” is exactly how people speak.
Will it recommend out-of-stock products?
Not unless you ask it to. Stock is part of the filter, and an out-of-stock item is marked clearly if it does appear.