Selling
AI Chat: Answer Shopper Questions on Your Storefront
Turn on a chat widget that answers shopper questions from facts you write or BestWebby crawls from your own site — never from outside knowledge.
Overview
AI Chat is a small chat widget on your storefront that answers shopper questions — shipping times, return windows, sizing, anything you've told it. It only ever answers from a knowledge base you control: entries you write by hand, or entries BestWebby crawled from your own site's pages. It never makes up an answer from outside knowledge, and a question it can't answer hands off rather than guessing.
Go to Channels → AI Chat to set it up (this takes you to the knowledge base for your main site, or lets you pick a site first if you have more than one).
Step 1: Give it something to answer from
Manual entries. Click Add entry, give it a short title and the answer in plain text — "Do you ship to Canada?" / "Yes, 5–7 business days, $12 flat rate." Add as many as you like; edit or delete them any time.
Crawled entries. BestWebby can also read your own storefront pages (FAQ, shipping, returns) and turn them into entries automatically. These show up read-only here — to change what they say, edit the page on your site and recrawl; you can't hand-edit a crawled entry, since it would just be overwritten on the next crawl.
The page shows how many manual and crawled entries you have, and when crawled entries were last refreshed.
Step 2: Turn it on
Flip the switch at the top of the page. If you have zero entries — manual or crawled — turning it on is confirmed first: with nothing to answer from, every question would hand off to support immediately, so you're asked to add an entry or crawl your site first.
What a shopper sees
The chat widget appears on your storefront. It answers only from your entries; if nothing in them is a good enough match for the question, it says so and offers to hand off rather than inventing an answer.
Good to know
- This is a different knowledge base from the one behind BestWebby's own platform help chat (the "?" panel inside your dashboard) — that one answers "how do I use BestWebby," grounded in BestWebby's own manual, and knows nothing about your store's entries. AI Chat answers "tell me about this store," grounded only in what you've written or crawled.
- Crawled entries are replaced wholesale on each crawl — if you want a permanent answer that never changes even if the page does, write it as a manual entry instead.