Description
Zilco turns your WooCommerce catalog into an AI shopping assistant. The plugin keeps your
products in sync with the Zilco service and embeds a chat widget on your storefront, so
visitors can ask questions in their own words and get answers grounded in your actual
products, prices, stock, and categories.
This plugin requires an account on the Zilco service (zilco.ai) to work. See the
“External services” section below for exactly what data leaves your site and when.
What it does
- Full catalog sync. Push every product — including drafts and private products, which
are sent as inactive — to Zilco on demand from the settings screen, on an hourly WP-Cron
schedule, or from an external cron service via a token-protected endpoint. - Incremental sync. When you create, edit, trash, restore, or delete a product, or when
its stock changes, only that product is re-sent. Multiple edits within one request are
collapsed into a single update. - Simple and variable products. Variations are sent as variants of their parent product,
with their own SKU, price, stock, and attribute values. - Rich mapping. Titles, descriptions, categories, brands, attributes, images, GTIN/MPN,
weight and dimensions, sale prices, and availability are mapped for you. - Storefront chat widget. A small loader script is added to your theme’s head. On a
product page it tells the assistant which product the visitor is looking at. - Built for large catalogs. Batched requests, request pacing, automatic retries on rate
limits, database keepalive, and object cache flushing between batches. On hosts that
support it, the cron endpoint responds immediately and finishes the sync in the background
so reverse proxies never time out.
What it does not do
The plugin never writes to your products. It reads catalog data and sends it to Zilco. It
does not touch orders, customers, or any personal data of your shoppers.
External services
This plugin relies on Zilco, a third-party software-as-a-service platform operated by
SIGNITIVE SRL, to index your catalog and to generate assistant replies. The plugin is not
useful without it. Nothing is transmitted until you enter your Zilco API keys and explicitly
enable catalog sync or the storefront widget in the plugin settings; both options are
disabled by default.
Service: Zilco — https://zilco.ai
Terms of use: https://zilco.ai/service-terms
Privacy policy: https://zilco.ai/service-privacy
Catalog sync (api.zilco.ai)
What is sent: product data from your store — product and variation IDs, SKU, GTIN and MPN,
name, short description and description, permalink, image URLs, categories, brands,
attributes, price and sale price, currency, stock status and quantity, weight and dimensions,
publish status, and last-modified date. Your site’s locale and the plugin version are sent
with each request, and your secret API key is sent as the request credential.
When it is sent: only while Enable catalog sync is on — when you click Run full
sync, when the hourly WP-Cron event runs (if you enable it), when the token-protected cron
endpoint is called, and whenever a product is created, updated, trashed, restored, deleted,
or has a stock change.
What is not sent: no order, customer, user, or site-visitor personal data is included in
catalog sync requests.
Storefront chat widget (chat.zilco.ai)
What is sent: while the widget is enabled, every storefront page load requests a loader
script from chat.zilco.ai, which means visitors’ browsers contact Zilco directly and Zilco
receives the usual request metadata (IP address, user agent, referring page). Your public
widget key, the site locale, and — on product pages — the ID of the product being viewed are
passed to the widget. If a visitor opens the chat, the messages they type are sent to Zilco
to be answered.
When it is sent: on every storefront page view while Enable chat widget is on.
Browser storage: the widget sets no cookies, but it stores a chat session pointer in the
visitor’s browser local storage so a conversation can be resumed. It expires after 7 days of
inactivity.
Because the widget causes your visitors’ browsers to contact a third party and stores data in
their browser, you should mention Zilco in your own site’s privacy and cookie notices before
enabling it. Zilco’s platform privacy notice, including its sub-processors, is at
https://zilco.ai/service-privacy
Screenshots


Installation
- Install and activate WooCommerce 8.0 or newer.
- Upload and activate this plugin.
- Create a site in your Zilco dashboard and copy its secret sync API key (
sk_…) and public widget key (pub_…). - In WordPress, go to WooCommerce Zilco and paste the keys.
- Tick Enable catalog sync and/or Enable chat widget. Both are off until you turn them on, and nothing is sent to Zilco before that.
- Click Run full sync to push your catalog for the first time.
FAQ
-
Do I need a paid Zilco account?
-
You need a Zilco account. The plugin itself is free and does not require payment to install
or use, but it cannot function without the Zilco service. -
Can I use the plugin for sync only, without the chat widget?
-
Yes. Catalog sync and the storefront widget are separate settings. Enable either one, both,
or neither. If you only want sync, leave the widget off and embed the widget yourself, or not
at all. -
Are drafts and private products sent to Zilco?
-
Yes, but flagged as inactive so the assistant never recommends them. This is deliberate: if
unpublished products were skipped entirely, unpublishing a product in WooCommerce would leave
it visible in the assistant. -
My catalog is large and the full sync times out. What should I do?
-
Use the cron URL shown on the settings screen with an external cron service. On hosts with
PHP-FPM the endpoint answers immediately and continues in the background. You can poll
progress by adding&status=1to that URL, and clear a stuck lock with&unlock=1. -
Do prices include tax?
-
By default yes. There is a setting to send prices excluding tax if that matches how you
display prices. -
Is High-Performance Order Storage supported?
-
Yes. The plugin declares HPOS compatibility. It never reads or writes orders.
-
What happens when I uninstall the plugin?
-
All plugin options, including your API keys and the cron token, are deleted, and the
scheduled sync event is removed. Data already indexed in Zilco is not deleted — remove it
from your Zilco dashboard.
Reviews
There are no reviews for this plugin.
Contributors & Developers
“Zilco” is open source software. The following people have contributed to this plugin.
ContributorsTranslate “Zilco” into your language.
Interested in development?
Browse the code, check out the SVN repository, or subscribe to the development log by RSS.
Changelog
0.1.2
- Use the WordPress HTTP API (
wp_remote_request) for all Zilco API calls instead of raw cURL.
0.1.1
- Security: encode the storefront widget config without JSON_UNESCAPED_SLASHES so a crafted
public key cannot break out of the inline script tag.
0.1.0
- Initial release: full and incremental catalog sync, simple and variable product mapping,
admin settings screen, WP-Cron schedule, token-protected cron endpoint, and storefront chat
widget embed.
