Connecting WooCommerce

The chatbot is given your product categories and your global attributes — the ones you set up once under Products → Attributes and reuse — together with how many products carry each. That is what lets it answer "do you have this in blue?" with the colours you really stock rather than guessing.

Two things it deliberately leaves out. Attributes typed onto a single product, rather than defined globally, cannot be filtered on in WooCommerce at all, so they are never offered as a choice. And a category or a value with nothing published in it is dropped, because suggesting one only leads the chatbot to an empty result.

If a category the chatbot should know about never comes up, check that it has published products in it.

Questions that are not about a specific order or product — delivery times, returns, sizing, materials — are answered from your knowledge base. On WooCommerce there is no API to read your policy pages from, so Supportify builds it by reading your storefront's sitemap when you connect, and indexing the content pages it finds.

Product pages are deliberately skipped: the chatbot already reads those through the API, in more detail than the page shows.

You can see exactly what was indexed, add pages, or upload documents under Knowledge base in your dashboard. If your site publishes no sitemap — rare, but it happens on very custom setups — nothing is indexed automatically and you can add the pages yourself there.

WooCommerce has two numbers per order: an internal id, and the number the customer sees. By default they are the same and everything just works.

If a plugin numbers your orders separately, WooCommerce's own search still looks a number up as an id — so asking for order 14672 can land on a completely different order. The chatbot refuses to show an order whose number does not match what the customer asked for, which means it will say it could not find the order rather than showing the wrong one.

Most of these plugins can register their number with WooCommerce search (the `woocommerce_shop_order_search_fields` filter), and when they do, lookups work normally. If your customers are told their order cannot be found even though the number is right, this is the setting to check with your plugin.

When a customer wants to order through the chat, the chatbot creates the order in WooCommerce with the status Pending payment and gives them a payment link. Nobody is charged until they pay it, and paying moves the order to Processing by itself — exactly as if they had checked out normally. Orders created this way are tagged so you can tell them apart.

The link does not last forever. WooCommerce cancels unpaid orders after the time set in WooCommerce → Settings → Products → Inventory → Hold stock (minutes), which defaults to 60. That is a WooCommerce setting, not ours — if you want customers to be able to pay a link the next morning, raise it or clear it there.

Unlike Shopify, WooCommerce has no way for us to trigger its invoice email, so the chatbot gives the customer the link in the conversation rather than by email.

Usually the most common question a store gets, and WooCommerce has no field of its own for the answer — so it depends on how your tracking numbers are stored.

• Using a shipment tracking plugin? WooCommerce Shipment Tracking and Advanced Shipment Tracking both work with no setup on your side. The chatbot reads the tracking number off the order and gives the customer a link to the carrier. If your carrier is not one it recognises, the customer still gets the number and the carrier name — just not a link.
• Using one of our carrier integrations? Connect it under Integrations and the chatbot answers from the carrier itself, which works regardless of what your store stores.
• Neither? The chatbot can say an order has shipped, and will raise a ticket for anything more.

When a customer reports a damaged, wrong or missing item, the chatbot can prepare a replacement at no charge. It never sends one by itself — the request lands in your Replacements queue, and nothing is picked or shipped until somebody on your team approves it.

WooCommerce has no draft orders, so the replacement is created as an ordinary order held at Pending payment: nobody is charged, no stock moves, and it does not appear in your fulfilment list. Approving it moves it to Processing, which is when your stock comes off the shelf and your warehouse sees it. Rejecting it sends the order to the trash, where it stays recoverable.

The goods and the postage are both set to zero explicitly on the order, so the customer is never invoiced for an apology. Both orders are tagged — as order notes, since WooCommerce has no order tags — so you can see which parcel replaced which.

The chatbot can remove an item, reduce a quantity or swap one thing for another of the same price, and WooCommerce recalculates the order total and tax itself when it does.

It will never change what an order costs without the customer agreeing to the exact amount first. An edit that moves money is stopped, the amount is put to the customer, and only once they say yes is the change made — whether they end up owing more or being owed a refund.

It will not add a paid item to an order. WooCommerce works out what a new line costs only once the line exists, so there is no exact figure to give the customer beforehand, and an approximate one is not something anybody should be charged against. Removing and reducing stay exact, because the price of what is already on the order is known, and a same-price swap or a free gift changes nothing to agree to. For anything else the chatbot hands the case to your team.

WooCommerce has no way for us to trigger its own customer emails, so a customer is not emailed about an edit — the conversation is the record.

Neither is part of WooCommerce. Both arrive as separate extensions, so Supportify asks your store which ones it has rather than assuming — it reads the list of endpoints your store publishes, once a day.

• WooCommerce Subscriptions lets the chatbot send a customer a checkout link that starts a subscription, and answer how often a subscription product is delivered. The link builds a cart on your storefront exactly as the buy button does, so nothing is charged until the customer completes checkout.
• Gift Cards lets the chatbot issue a gift card as compensation. Note the extension emails the card to the customer — the chatbot tells them to check their inbox rather than reading the code out in the chat, and a card can only be issued to an address the customer has verified.

If you install one of these, it becomes available within a day without you doing anything. If you have neither, the chatbot is never offered them and will not mention either to a customer.

On Shopify this is a tag. WooCommerce has no tags on orders or customers — only on products — so the chatbot writes the flag as an order note instead, which appears in the notes panel on the order screen where you already look. Notes written this way are internal and are never emailed to the customer.

The difference that matters: a WooCommerce order note is something you read, not something you can filter or search your orders by. If you need to pull up every order the chatbot flagged, do it from your Supportify inbox rather than from WooCommerce.

Customers get the flag recorded against their record too, but with no notes panel of their own it is only visible to us.