AI Chat: Answer Shopper Questions on Your Storefront

Overview

AI Chat is a small chat widget on your storefront. It answers shopper questions — shipping times, return windows, sizing, prices, whether something is in stock — and it only ever answers from facts that came from you. It never makes up an answer from outside knowledge.

AI Chat is on every plan.

When it genuinely cannot answer, it does not simply apologise and forget. The question is recorded, you are alerted, and your answer goes back to the shopper and into the knowledge base, so the next shopper who asks it is answered in a second.

Go to Channels → AI Chat to set it up, and Customers → Shopper chat to see the questions and conversations.

What it answers from

Your own entries. Click Add entry on the knowledge base page, 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. These are the entries that win arguments: they are what you said, in your words.

Your own pages. BestWebby can read your storefront pages (FAQ, shipping, returns) and turn them into entries automatically. They show up read-only — to change what they say, edit the page and recrawl. A hand-edit here would be overwritten on the next crawl.

Your catalogue. Every published product becomes an entry on its own, built from what you already maintain: the description, category, product code, listed price, specifications, tags, how it is sold, and whether a partner fulfils it. You do not write these and you do not maintain them — they regenerate when you change a product, and an entry for a product you delete is retired.

Your live stock and prices. Product entries deliberately carry no stock count. A count saved into an entry is true for about as long as it takes someone to buy one, and the chat quoting a stale number with your shop's authority behind it is worse than it saying nothing. So when a shopper asks what something costs or whether it is in stock, those two figures are read from your catalogue at the moment they ask — the price this storefront actually charges in its own currency, and whether they can buy it right now. A product your shop would refuse to sell (hidden, unpublished, or not priced for that market) is never quoted.

Turn it on

Flip the switch at the top of the knowledge base page. If you have no entries at all, turning it on is confirmed first: with nothing to answer from, every question would come straight to you.

When it cannot answer

This is the part that makes the chat get better instead of just forwarding work.

1. The question is recorded. One row per question, however it is worded. "Do you ship to Alberta?", "Can you ship to Alberta, and how long does it take?" and "Do you deliver to Alberta?" are one thing for you to answer, with a count of how many people asked and the other wordings listed underneath, so you can see if one of them is really asking something extra.

Two questions are only merged when they mean the same thing, and three rules stop that going wrong: the match has to be a strong one, a question and its negative are never merged (“is this dishwasher safe” and “is this not dishwasher safe” want opposite answers), and a one-word question like “price?” is left on its own rather than being swallowed by every other question about price.

1. The shopper is offered a reply address. Only at this point, never as a form up front. If they leave one, your answer can reach them after they have closed the tab.
2. You are alerted — in your dashboard, by email, and on your phone if you have turned on browser notifications (Settings → Notifications → Push). Each question alerts once. A shop that takes a dozen in a minute gets one alert saying a dozen, not a dozen alerts.
3. You answer it in Customers → Shopper chat. One answer, typed once, does four things: it goes to every shopper who asked and left an address, it appears in their chat window if they are still on the page, it is saved against the question, and — unless you untick the box — it becomes a knowledge base entry under the shopper's own wording, so the chat answers it itself from then on.

If you answer a question and shoppers still get deflected on it, the question re-opens and alerts you again. That is deliberate: it means the entry you wrote is not matching how people ask, and it is worth knowing.

Taking over a conversation

In Customers → Shopper chat → Conversations you can read any conversation and join it. While you are there the chat stays silent — it will not answer over you. Your replies appear in the shopper's widget within a few seconds.

Presence is live, not a switch: if you close the tab or walk away, the chat starts answering again after about a minute and a half rather than leaving shoppers talking to an empty room.

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"; AI Chat answers "tell me about this store".
• Answering a shopper by email sends from your domain, so it reads as your shop replying. If you have not set up email on your own domain yet, the answer is still saved and still added to the knowledge base, and the screen tells you plainly that the shopper could not be emailed.
• Anyone with the support roles (owner, admin, manager, staff, accountant) can answer questions and join conversations.
• Crawled entries are replaced wholesale on each crawl. For an answer that must never change even if a page does, write it as a manual entry.