The chatbot decides which of these to use from what the shopper asks. Knowing what each one does is useful for two reasons: reading the activity log, and deciding which to switch off.
Five read. One writes.
Catalog search
Searches your published, catalog-visible products. Handles the filters a shopper actually asks in — a category, a price range, what is on sale — and pages through results when there are more.
Results render as a product list with photo, price, and stock.
Catalog lookup
Fetches specific products by ID, up to ten at a time, when the chatbot already knows which ones it means — usually following up on something earlier in the conversation.
A product that has been deleted or hidden since comes back as a note to the shopper rather than a silent gap, and the rest still render.
Product detail
One product, in full, including its option matrix for variable products.
This is the one that lets a shopper choose a size and colour in the chat. When their choices narrow to a single variation, the result carries that variation’s own price, SKU and availability. When they only narrow it part of the way, the shopper is asked for the missing option by name rather than being told something is unavailable.
A variable product with nothing purchasable says so plainly.
Shop policies and FAQs
Answers shipping, returns, refund, and payment questions, resolving in three tiers:
- Your WooCommerce settings pages — the pages you have set as Terms, Privacy, and Refunds and Returns.
- Knowledge Base articles tagged
policyorfaq— treated as authoritative. - Any other Knowledge Base article, as a best-effort fallback, labelled as such.
Tier 2 is why those two tags are not decorative. Tagging an article faq opts
it into being shown to a shopper asking where their parcel is — excellent for
“Do you ship internationally?”, unhelpful for anything else. See Organising
articles with categories and tags.
Cart contents
Reads the shopper’s current cart — items, quantities, options, totals, and a checkout link. Never cached, because a cart is by definition mutable.
Cart changes
The only tool that changes anything. Adds items, changes quantities, and removes lines.
Two things about how it behaves:
- Partial success is normal. If one item is out of stock, that line is rejected and reported to the shopper while the rest of the changes still go through. A basket that half-worked is better than one that silently did nothing.
- Every change gets an Undo button. That is why it does not use a confirmation step — cart changes are reversible, and a confirm on every add makes the conversation unusable.
Where to go next
Carts, guests and page caching for the one thing on this list with a real infrastructure consequence.
