Connecting WooCommerce
Give Supportify access to your WooCommerce store so the chatbot can look up orders, answer product questions and issue refunds.
WooCommerce connects with a pair of REST API keys that you generate in your own WordPress admin. There is no plugin to install. The whole thing takes a few minutes — and there is one WordPress setting further down this page that will silently break things if it is wrong, so it is worth reading to the end before you start.
Create a REST API key
In your WordPress admin, go to WooCommerce → Settings → Advanced → REST API and click Add key.
- Description — something a colleague will recognise later, e.g. "Supportify AI".
- User — an administrator account.
- Permissions — choose Read/Write.
Click Generate API key. WooCommerce shows you a Consumer Key and a Consumer Secret.
Copy both now
WooCommerce shows the consumer secret exactly once. If you navigate away without copying it, you will have to revoke the key and generate a new one.
Read-only is a valid choice
If you would rather the chatbot only ever answered questions, pick Read instead of Read/Write. We detect that the key cannot write and simply stop offering cancellations, refunds and discount codes — the chatbot will not try and fail in front of a customer.
Check your permalink setting
Go to Settings → Permalinks in WordPress and make sure it is set to anything other than "Plain" — "Post name" is the usual choice.
This sounds unrelated and is not. WooCommerce serves its API under `/wp-json`, and with plain permalinks WordPress does not route requests there properly.
Why this one gets its own step
With plain permalinks, a store does not return a clean error — it returns its home page with a success code. We check for that now and refuse to treat it as success, but the underlying store still cannot accept a refund or a coupon until permalinks are fixed. Changing this setting is safe and takes one click.
Connect in Supportify
Open Settings → Store connection in Supportify and enter:
- Store URL — the address customers visit, e.g. `https://your-store.com`
- Consumer Key
- Consumer Secret
We test the credentials against your store before saving them, so a wrong key or an unreachable URL is rejected immediately with the reason, rather than being accepted and failing later.
Tip
Some hosts strip authentication headers from incoming requests. If yours does, we fall back to a different authentication method automatically — you should not need to do anything, and a store that works in a browser generally works here.
What your chatbot can do on WooCommerce
Supportify only offers the tools your platform genuinely supports, so the chatbot never promises a customer something it cannot deliver.
Available
- Look up an order by number or email
- Look up a customer and their order history
- Search products and answer questions about them
- Look up and create discount codes — WooCommerce coupons work well
- Cancel an order
- Issue a refund
- Correct a customer address or phone number
- Everything that does not need your store at all: knowledge-base answers, support tickets, ratings
Not available
- Tracking numbers. WooCommerce has no built-in place to store one — plugins each do it their own way — so the chatbot can tell a customer an order has shipped, but not where the parcel is. See the note below.
- Returns as a formal process. Core WooCommerce has no return object. The chatbot can refund an order or raise a ticket instead.
- Editing or creating orders, and gift cards. No core WooCommerce equivalent.
If tracking matters to you
"Where is my parcel?" is usually the most common question a store gets. If your shipping is handled by one of the carriers Supportify integrates with directly, connect it under Integrations — the chatbot then answers tracking questions from the carrier rather than from WooCommerce, which works regardless of what your store stores.
Refunds on bank transfer, cash on delivery or cheque
Refunding through the payment gateway only works when there is a gateway involved. On an order paid by bank transfer, cash on delivery or cheque, WooCommerce cannot send money back, and asking it to will fail. Those refunds are recorded in WooCommerce as a refund — so your books and the customer's order both reflect it — while the money itself is moved by you, the way it came in.
A note on coupon codes
WooCommerce stores every coupon code in lower case, and matches them exactly. `SUMMER20` and `summer20` are the same coupon to WooCommerce, so do not be surprised when a code you created in capitals comes back lower case.
Putting the widget on your site
Open Embed code in Supportify, copy the snippet, and add it to your WordPress site so it loads on every page.
The simplest route on most themes is Appearance → Customize → Additional CSS/JS if your theme offers it, or any "header and footer scripts" plugin. If your theme has a child theme, adding it to the footer template works too. The snippet carries your own widget key, so nothing else needs configuring.
See Deploying the Chat Widget for what the widget looks like and how to style it.
If something stops working
Self-hosted WordPress varies enormously — plugins, hosts, versions and security rules all differ — so a connection that worked can stop for reasons that have nothing to do with Supportify. The usual suspects, in the order worth checking:
- The key was revoked in WooCommerce → Settings → Advanced → REST API.
- Permalinks were changed back to Plain.
- A security or firewall plugin started blocking API requests.
- The store moved to a new domain, so the saved URL no longer resolves.
Settings → Store connection shows the current state, and you can paste fresh keys there at any time without losing your knowledge base, conversation history or settings.