WooCommerce is optional. The chat widget, the Knowledge Base, the Conversations inbox, and human handoff all work on any WordPress site.
What “optional” means here
The shopping tools are not disabled-but-present, and they are not a setting you have to remember to turn off. On a site without WooCommerce they do not exist:
- They are never registered.
- The chatbot is never told they exist, so it cannot try to call them.
- Nothing about them reaches your AI provider.
- No settings for them appear anywhere in the admin.
You do not configure this. It is what happens.
What you keep
Everything that is not shopping:
- The chat widget, answering from your Knowledge Base.
- The public Knowledge Base pages.
- The Conversations inbox, with search, assignment, pinning and closing.
- Human handoff.
- Spend caps, rate limits, and Diagnostics.
Installing WooCommerce later
The shopping tools switch on by themselves, with no configuration. There is nothing to enable and no migration to run.
Two things worth doing on the day that happens:
- Set your policy pages under WooCommerce’s settings — Terms, Privacy, and Refunds and Returns. They are the first place the chatbot looks for shipping and returns answers.
- Re-read what the cart tools imply for your page cache. See Carts, guests and page caching — that one has a real infrastructure consequence and it arrives the moment WooCommerce does.
Removing WooCommerce later
The tools disappear again just as quietly. Conversations that used them keep their stored results, so an old thread still renders the product card the shopper saw at the time.
A note on the two seeded tags
Sohay creates policy and faq Knowledge Base tags on activation, whether or
not you run a store. On a site without WooCommerce they currently do nothing.
If there is any chance of adding WooCommerce later, it is worth tagging as
though it is already there — a faq-tagged article becomes eligible to answer
a shopper’s shipping question the moment the store exists, and you will not
remember to go back and tag them.
Where to go next
What the chatbot can do on a WooCommerce store, if you are weighing whether to add one.
