About this plugin
Shoppers who can’t find what they want leave. Wow Chat for Woo gives your WooCommerce store a chatbot, a guided product finder, an FAQ system and instant product search — all running on your own server, with no account to create and no monthly bill.
This is not a hosted chat service with a WordPress wrapper around it. There is no signup, no external dashboard, and no per-message pricing. Activate the plugin, spend a few minutes in the settings, and shoppers get answers backed by your real catalog — with product cards they can add to the cart without leaving the conversation.
Why merchants choose it
- Nothing to sign up for. No account, no API key, no trial clock. Install, configure, done.
- No monthly fees. Everything on this page is free — no message caps, no seat limits, no upgrade wall in the middle of a conversation.
- It knows your catalog. Chat replies and search results come from your own products, with image, price, stock state and a working add-to-cart button.
- Private by architecture. Shopper messages, search queries and analytics stay in your own WordPress database. The plugin does not phone home. The single optional exception — the AI FAQ Generator — is described below, and it does nothing until you enter your own key.
Chatbot and product finder
Choose the shape that suits your store: a floating bubble, a slide-in drawer, or an immersive full-screen finder.
- Answers come from FAQ entries you write. When nothing matches, the chat searches your catalog and replies with matching products instead of a dead end.
- Product cards show your WooCommerce image, price and stock state, and add to the cart silently so shoppers stay in the conversation. Variable and external products show WooCommerce’s own button text (“Select options”, “Read more”) and link through correctly.
- Opening suggestions — quick-reply starters you curate — give shoppers something to tap instead of a blank prompt.
- The launcher is yours to style: custom label, an icon or no icon at all, and colors that match your theme.
- You decide how many product cards an answer may show (1 to 8).
Instant product search
- Results appear as the shopper types, with no page reload.
- Backed by a dedicated product index and a MySQL FULLTEXT ranker that understands word forms (a search for “boots” also matches “boot”), matches SKUs exactly, favours products whose title contains what was typed, and gives in-stock and recently updated products a lift.
- The search dictionary is built from your own catalog — your categories, tags, brands and attributes — so it speaks your store’s vocabulary rather than a generic word list.
- It can optionally take over your theme’s default search box, so every search on the site uses it.
- Place it anywhere with the Wow Search block or the [wow_chat_for_woo_search] shortcode.
FAQ system
Write an FAQ entry once — a few trigger phrases and the answer — and the chat handles shoppers who ask the same thing a dozen different ways.
- Attach products, categories, tags, brands, on-sale items or featured items to any entry, and matching answers show those products as cards.
- Everything is stored on your own site and works with no third-party service.
AI FAQ Generator (optional)
Draft a batch of FAQ entries from your catalog using your own OpenAI API key, review them in a grid, edit anything you want, and publish only the ones you like.
- Requests go from your server straight to OpenAI with your key. Nothing is routed through us — we never see your key, your catalog or your drafts.
- This is the only feature that contacts a third party, and it does nothing until you enter a key. Leave it blank and the plugin stays entirely local.
Recommendation widgets
- Recently viewed — bring shoppers back to products they already looked at.
- Related products and Frequently bought together — surface the next thing to buy on product pages.
Analytics that stay on your site
Conversations, answered rate, top shopper questions, top search queries and product clicks — collected locally and shown on the plugin dashboard. There is no external analytics service, and nothing leaves your database.
Blocks, shortcode and developer hooks
Four blocks — Wow Search, Wow Recently Viewed, Wow Related Products, Wow Frequently Bought Together — plus the [wow_chat_for_woo_search] shortcode.
Developers get filters throughout: wow_chat_for_woo_search_results, wow_chat_for_woo_search_strategy, wow_chat_for_woo_search_dictionary, wow_chat_for_woo_replace_default_search, wow_chat_for_woo_related_ids, wow_chat_for_woo_fbt_ids, wow_chat_for_woo_chat_config, wow_chat_for_woo_storefront_suggestions, wow_chat_for_woo_faq_generate_prompt, and more.
Wow Chat for Woo Pro (coming soon)
A separate Pro plugin is in development, adding AI chat that understands shopper intent, smarter search and recommendations, and more ways to reach shoppers. It is not available yet, and nothing on this page depends on it.
Reserve early access
Links
- Plugin homepage and documentation
- Support forum
- Building from source: see the Development section below — the plugin ships full, readable source for every compiled asset.
Development
This plugin ships both the compiled assets (in build/ ) and their full, human-readable source so the build is reproducible.
- JavaScript/TypeScript/SCSS source: src/ — every bundle under build/ is compiled from a matching entry point in src/ (e.g. build/admin/index.js ← src/admin/index.tsx, build/blocks/<name>/index.js ← src/blocks/<name>/index.js ).
- Build tooling: @wordpress/scripts (webpack), configured in webpack.config.js and tsconfig.json. Dependencies and the build script are declared in package.json / package-lock.json.
- Build the assets:
- npm install
- npm run build — regenerates everything in build/.
- PHP dependencies: composer.json declares dev-only tooling (PHPUnit, WP Coding Standards). No runtime Composer dependencies. Run composer install then vendor/bin/phpunit for the PHP test suite.
No third-party JavaScript libraries are bundled into the compiled assets. The only external packages used ( @wordpress/* and react ) are not bundled — they load from the WordPress-provided script globals at runtime.