Alex

Thanks – glad the try-on is working for you.

Short answer: the Assistant is not a chatbot with your site pasted into a prompt. The work is in the catalog layer, not the model.

What it’s grounded on. It answers from your actual WooCommerce data – product titles, categories, attributes, variants and their options, SKU, price, sale price and live stock. So it can say “that dress is only in children’s sizes 5–6Y to 12–13Y, want me to look for another floral one in adult Medium?” rather than confidently inventing a product you don’t sell. When it doesn’t have something, it says so.

It can actually sell. Product cards come back in the chat with the real variants; the shopper taps size and colour, combinations you don’t stock are greyed out, the price updates to the exact variant, and Add to Cart adds that variant. No handoff to a search page.

The part that’s genuinely hard is keeping it true. Three things run underneath:

• A background full sync in batches through Action Scheduler. It’s resumable – it survives a closed tab, a logged-out admin, or a fatal error mid-run, and picks up from its cursor. That’s the difference between something that demos well on 50 products and something that works on 40,000.
• Incremental deltas. Every product save, stock change, status change and deletion marks that product dirty and a debounced job pushes just those. Without it the assistant quotes whatever was true the last time someone pressed a button – and a shopper told “199, in stock” who then meets 249 in the cart doesn’t blame the catalog, they stop trusting the shop.
• An hourly self-healing job that resumes stalled runs, retries failures and re-syncs fully once a day.

Other things worth knowing: it replies in whichever language the shopper writes in. You fill in a short “store brain” (what you sell, tone, who you sell to, your policies) that grounds the non-catalog answers. You can leave it open to everyone or require a customer account. There’s a daily message cap per visitor and a concurrency ceiling, because every reply costs credits and a public chat box without limits is a bill waiting to happen. With AI Vision on, a shopper can upload a photo of a room or an outfit and get recommendations from it. And it registers proper WordPress personal-data exporter and eraser handlers, so a GDPR request covers the conversations too.

Where it won’t help: it only knows what’s in your catalog and your store brain. It’s not a general-purpose support bot – it won’t answer “where’s my order #1234” or handle a returns workflow. And the quality of the non-product answers is only as good as what you put in the store brain; leave that empty and it’s vague.

Happy to answer anything specific.

Alex