Description
Nili adds a shopping assistant to your store that has actually read your catalogue.
Ask it “do you have anything waterproof under $100?” and it answers from your products, with real links and images pulled from your own store, rather than inventing something plausible. Ask it about shipping and it answers from your shipping page. Ask it about anything else and it politely declines, because it is a shop assistant, not a search engine.
Nili is not supported on multisite. Connection settings are per site and editable by any site administrator, which is not a safe home for a shared credential.
Why it does not make things up
Most chat plugins hand your visitor’s question straight to a general-purpose AI, which answers from whatever it learned on the internet. Nili reads your store first, then answers only from what it found. If the answer is not in your store, it says so.
What it does
- Reads your WooCommerce products, your pages, and any price lists or FAQs you upload
- Recommends real products, with the real permalink and image, never a guessed URL
- Lets shoppers search by photo: upload a picture, get the closest matches from your catalogue
- Streams answers as they are written, so it feels fast
- Refuses anything unrelated to your store
- Works on mobile, including staying above the on-screen keyboard
- Light and dark, your accent colour, your corner
Nothing to sign up for
There is no AI account to open and no key to find. Activate the plugin, press one button, and the assistant is connected. The free plan includes 50 answers a month, so you can see how it handles your own products before deciding anything. Nili also caps how many questions it answers per day, so a busy day cannot surprise you.
Stores with their own AI contract can point Nili at their own OpenAI or Azure account instead, by defining NILI_PROVIDER and NILI_API_KEY in wp-config.php.
Built to stay out of the way
The widget renders in a shadow root, so your theme cannot break it and it cannot break your theme. No jQuery, no framework, no build step.
External services
Nili sends data to one external service, Nili Cloud, operated by Sama Nova LLC at https://api.nili.chat. Nothing works without it unless you configure your own AI account, described under “Can I use my own AI account?” above.
When it is contacted
- Once, when you press “Switch it on” during setup, to register this site and receive its connection.
- Each time the assistant answers a shopper, to generate that answer.
- Each time your store is read or re-read, to turn your text into the form the assistant searches.
- When you send a message from the Help tab inside the plugin.
What is sent
- On registration: your site URL and site name.
- On each answer: the shopper’s question, the handful of your own records the site has already matched to it, and an uploaded photo if the shopper attached one for that single request.
- On indexing: the text of the products, pages and files you chose to include.
- On a support message: what you typed, your reply address, and, only if you leave the box ticked, details about this installation such as WordPress and PHP versions.
What is never sent
Shopper IP addresses are converted to a one-way salted hash before they leave your site. Conversation history is held on your own server and discarded after 30 minutes. Your catalogue is stored on your own server, not ours.
Answers are generated by an enterprise AI provider under contract to Sama Nova LLC, in the United States. Your data is never used to train any model, and that is a term of the contract rather than a policy. The current provider is named in our privacy policy, linked below.
Terms of service: https://nili.chat/terms/
Privacy policy: https://nili.chat/privacy/
Optional: your own AI account (OpenAI or Anthropic)
Nili Cloud is the default and is all most stores use. If you would rather run the assistant on your own AI contract, you can point it at OpenAI or Anthropic instead, as described under “Can I use my own AI account?” above. This is off by default and is used only when you set it up yourself with your own key.
When configured this way, and only then, the plugin sends the shopper’s question and the matched excerpts of your own catalogue directly to that provider to generate each answer, and sends your catalogue text to it during indexing. Nothing is sent to these providers unless you have entered your own key for one of them.
- OpenAI. Terms of use: https://openai.com/policies/terms-of-use . Privacy policy: https://openai.com/policies/privacy-policy .
- Anthropic. Terms of service: https://www.anthropic.com/legal/commercial-terms . Privacy policy: https://www.anthropic.com/legal/privacy .
A note on the cookie notice
The built-in consent manager recognises common third-party scripts, such as Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager and the Meta (Facebook) pixel, so it can hold them back until a visitor agrees. The plugin does not load or contact any of these itself, and does not send them your data. It only detects the ones your own site already uses, so that its cookie notice can gate them.
Screenshots
Installation
- Install and activate the plugin.
- You will land on a four-step setup screen.
- Press “Switch it on”. There is nothing to paste.
- Click “Read my store” and wait for the progress bar.
- Choose how it looks, beside a live preview of your own shop, and where it should appear: your whole site, or a single page while you try it out.
Cautious about a busy shop? Create a page called something like “Test Nili” and publish it, but leave it out of your menus so nothing links to it. On that last step choose “Just the pages I choose” and pick it. Only someone with the address can reach it, so you can try the assistant properly without a single shopper seeing it, and every other page carries on exactly as before.
FAQ
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Do I need WooCommerce?
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No, but it is much more useful with it. Without WooCommerce, Nili still answers from your pages and uploaded files. With it, it knows your whole catalogue.
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How much does it cost to run?
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The free plan includes 50 answers a month. Beyond that, paid plans cover what the assistant uses, so there is no separate AI bill to watch. Nili also has a daily cap so the total stays predictable, and an off switch on the main screen.
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Can I use my own AI account?
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Yes, though there is no setting for it. It is configured in
wp-config.php:define( 'NILI_PROVIDER', 'openai' ); define( 'NILI_API_KEY', 'your-key-here' );Keeping it there rather than in a settings field is deliberate: anyone who can administer a WordPress site can read a key saved in the database, whereas this keeps it in a file. Set a spending limit with your provider either way.
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Will it recommend products that are out of stock?
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It knows the stock state of every product it read and will say when something is unavailable. Re-read your store, or leave the automatic daily check on, to keep that current.
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What happens if the AI service is down?
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The visitor sees a short, plain error rather than a broken widget, and nothing is charged.
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Does it store my visitors’ conversations?
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Conversations are held for 30 minutes so the assistant can follow a thread, then discarded. Thumbs-up and thumbs-down ratings are kept so you can see what is working. Visitor IP addresses are never stored, only a salted, one-way hash used for rate limiting.
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My site uses a page cache or a CDN. Will the widget break?
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No, including on Cloudflare. Caching is the normal case for a busy store, so the widget is built for it: it never relies on the security token printed into the page, because cached HTML serves the same token to every visitor until the cache entry expires. Instead it fetches a fresh one at runtime from a URL a cache cannot answer from a stored copy, and if that token is refused it retries as an ordinary guest rather than showing an error.
Product questions therefore work on a fully cached page. The one thing that needs a real signed-in session is a shopper asking about their own order, which is by design. Order details are never served to a request WordPress has not authenticated.
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I use Cloudflare. Is there anything to set?
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Nothing required. Two settings are worth knowing about:
- If you have a page rule that caches everything, purge the cache once after installing or updating, so visitors get the current widget rather than a stored copy of the previous one.
- Rocket Loader changes when scripts run. The widget is built to tolerate it, but if the assistant does not appear, switching Rocket Loader off for the page is the quickest way to confirm whether it is involved.
Reviews
There are no reviews for this plugin.
Contributors & Developers
“Nili AI Shopping Assistant” is open source software. The following people have contributed to this plugin.
Contributors
Translate “Nili AI Shopping Assistant” into your language.
Interested in development?
Browse the code, check out the SVN repository, or subscribe to the development log by RSS.
Changelog
1.0.4
- The live preview no longer covers the assistant with the cookie notice, so the button and panel styles are visible while you choose them. The notice still previews on its own in the cookie settings.
- Added two colours for the cookie notice, Light and Glass, alongside the default Dark. The colour is separate from where the notice sits.
- Two launcher buttons were redrawn: “Talk to Nili” types a real question after a glowing caret, and the orb now shows the Nili mark under a bead of liquid glass.
1.0.3
- First public release.
- Answers only from your own products, pages and files, never from the open web.
- Replies in whatever language a shopper writes in, leaving your product names untranslated so they stay findable.
- Photo search: a shopper can send a picture and be shown the closest products you actually stock.
- Shop Health: a ranked list of what is stopping shoppers finding things, with the products named.
- Questions your shop could not answer, recorded so you can see what is missing.
- A built-in cookie notice and consent manager, which holds recognised third-party scripts back until a visitor agrees.
- Signed-in customers can ask about their own orders. Order lookup is scoped by the WordPress session, never by anything the conversation supplies.