WooCommerce AI chatbot for pre-checkout questions

WooCommerce doesn’t make an AI chatbot for shoppers, so every option for your storefront comes from another company. Two plugins built for WooCommerce that rank for this search, WoowBot and Amaya, run inside WordPress, read your product catalogue and answer with AI through a provider account you pay for, such as OpenAI. A hosted chatbot runs on its own servers instead and goes onto your store as one script tag. We read each plugin’s listing and prices below on 23 September 2026.

Deacon is an AI customer support agent for the questions shoppers ask before they check out. It goes into your WordPress footer as one script tag, answers in seconds from your store’s own pages, and shows you which questions come up most. Its free plan gives you 50 answers a month, with no card and no end date.

Two kinds of shopper question, and what a chatbot needs for each

What a chatbot can answer depends on where the answer lives, and on a store there are two places.

• Questions about your store. How much is delivery to Ireland? Can I return a sale item? What is this made of, and does it come in a larger size? Your shipping page, your returns policy and your product descriptions answer these, so any chatbot that has read those pages can answer them too.
• Questions about one shopper’s order. Where is my parcel? Has my refund gone through? Can I change the address? The answers live in your WooCommerce admin, and only a chatbot connected to it can give them.

Before checkout there’s no order yet, so the questions that decide a sale are all the first kind. The second kind comes after the sale. It’s worth knowing which of the two you want help with before you pick a chatbot. Our guide to AI chatbots for ecommerce compares the tools built for each.

The AI chatbot plugins built for WooCommerce

WooCommerce’s Marketplace sells AI chatbot extensions for shoppers, all made by other companies and mostly sold as yearly subscriptions, and the WordPress plugin directory has free ones. In a web search for “woocommerce ai chatbot” on 23 September 2026, WoowBot was the first listing from the directory and Amaya the first from the Marketplace.

Both plugins read your catalogue straight from WooCommerce, and WoowBot Pro can tell a shopper where their order stands. In return you set up an account with an AI provider such as OpenAI, pay it for what each reply uses on top of any licence, and keep one more plugin updated alongside WooCommerce. General WordPress chatbots such as Tidio and AI Engine work on a store too, and our guide to WordPress AI chatbots compares them.

Where the script tag goes on a WooCommerce store

A hosted chatbot’s tag goes in your WordPress footer, which puts it on every page of your store. WooCommerce’s developer docs advise against editing theme files, since a theme update loses what you changed in them, and recommend a plugin instead. For a script tag, a header-and-footer plugin does the job. With WPCode’s free Insert Headers and Footers, open Code Snippets › Header & Footer, paste the tag into the Footer box and click Save Changes, as WordPress.com’s guide to adding code describes. A classic theme’s footer.php works too, with the trade-offs our WordPress guide sets out. A block theme’s footer doesn’t reach your checkout, because WooCommerce’s checkout template leaves the site footer out.

Your checkout is a page on your own site

WooCommerce builds your cart, checkout and My Account as ordinary pages of your site, with the Checkout block on the checkout page, its guide to store pages explains. So the tag in WPCode’s Footer box puts the chat on your checkout as well, where shoppers ask their last questions before they pay, and on the order received page after it. That’s one difference from Shopify, whose checkout runs no theme code.

Two WooCommerce settings that hide your pages

A chatbot that learns by reading your store sees what a visitor sees, so two of WooCommerce’s defaults hide pages from it as well as from your shoppers.

Coming soon mode

A new store starts in Coming soon mode once you finish WooCommerce’s setup. Visitors get a landing page instead of your store, and only people you’ve let in, or who have a private link, see the rest, according to WooCommerce’s page on Coming soon mode. A chatbot reading your pages gets the landing page too. Switch to Live under WooCommerce › Settings › Site visibility before you point a chatbot at your store, or give it your policies as text until then.

The Refund and Returns Policy draft

Setup also writes a Refund and Returns Policy page, but leaves it as an unpublished draft full of sample text, WooCommerce’s list of store pages says. Shoppers can’t read a draft, and nor can a chatbot. Rewrite it in your own terms, publish it and link it from your footer. WooCommerce calls the page strongly recommended.

What Deacon does for a WooCommerce store

Deacon takes the first kind of question, the kind your pages answer. A shopper on a product page at midnight asks whether you deliver to Canada, and within seconds gets an answer in their own language, taken from your shipping page and often linked to it. Without it, that question sits in your inbox until morning, or leaves with the shopper.

When the answer isn’t on your pages, Deacon says it doesn’t know rather than inventing a delivery date, and offers the shopper a box for their email. You get an email when they leave their address or ask for a person. Your reply from the dashboard shows up in their chat while it’s open, and goes to their email once they’ve gone, if they left it in that chat.

It stays out of the second kind. Deacon can’t see your WooCommerce admin, so it never looks up an order, a refund or a stock level. A shopper who asks about their own order gets a polite decline and the email box, so you can reply. What Deacon can do is point people to what WooCommerce already gives them. Signed-in customers have their orders at /my-account/orders/, and the [woocommerce_order_tracking] shortcode makes a page where anyone can see an order’s status from its number and billing email, per WooCommerce’s shortcode guide. Mention them in your FAQ, and Deacon can answer “how do I track my order?” itself.

Each question your pages didn’t cover stays on a list in your dashboard with an Answer this button. Write the answer once and press Save & check, and Deacon puts the question to itself again to show you its new reply. When that reply answers it, you also see how many other open questions the same answer covers. From then on your answer is one of Deacon’s sources, so it can answer the next shopper who asks, and it needs you less each week.

You also see why shoppers hesitate. Every conversation is kept, and you can search them by what the shopper asked. Topics gathers similar questions, counts the people who asked and labels most groups, such as a how-to or a pricing question. Twenty shoppers asking whether you ship to Canada shows up as one topic with a count, not twenty scattered chats. The same script records your visitors, where they came from and the goals they reach.

Every feature comes on every plan, free included. You don’t set up an AI provider account, nothing is billed past your plan’s answers, and your plan never upgrades itself. The pricing page has the paid plans.

Adding Deacon to your WooCommerce store

Deacon needs no plugin of its own. Its snippet looks like this, with your key where the placeholder is.

<script src="https://heydeacon.com/widget/v1/loader.js" data-key="pk_your_widget_key" async></script>

It takes a few minutes.

1. Sign up with your email or Google, and give Deacon your store’s address. The free plan needs no card. Deacon reads your home page and up to four pages it links to that shoppers ask about first, such as your FAQ, never /cart/, /checkout/ or /my-account/.
2. On the Install page, check your store’s domain is listed, and add it if it isn’t. The website you gave when you signed up is already there, with your snippet ready, and it covers your address with and without www.
3. Paste the snippet into WPCode’s Footer box and save. A block theme’s footer would miss your checkout.
4. In Knowledge Sources, untick a /product-category/ or /product-tag/ listing if Deacon chose one. Your shipping and returns pages and your FAQ are the ones worth keeping.
5. Add any of those Deacon didn’t read, and the products people ask about most, one at a time, by pasting each address into Add website. Deacon learns a single page as soon as it has read it.
6. Try your shoppers’ questions in the Playground before the widget goes public.

What to check after you save

A few checks, in a few minutes.

1. Clear your cache. WooCommerce’s page on Coming soon mode warns that a server cache can go on showing the old site for a while after launch, and a caching plugin can do the same.
2. In a private window, open a product page and then your checkout, and look for the chat button on both.
3. Look at the top of Deacon’s Install page. It says whether Deacon is live on your site and when it was last seen, and it keeps checking by itself.
4. Ask a returns question and a question about an order number. The first should get your policy, often with a link to it, and the second a decline with a box for an email address.
5. Make sure WooCommerce › Settings › Site visibility says Live, or shoppers see your Coming soon page instead of the chat.

Questions about WooCommerce AI chatbots

Does WooCommerce have its own AI chatbot?

Not one for shoppers. Woo’s own WooCommerce AI, in private beta, is an assistant in your dashboard for running the store, and the shopper chatbots in its Marketplace come from other companies. You add a plugin built for WooCommerce, a general WordPress chatbot or a hosted one that goes in as a script tag.

Is there a free AI chatbot for WooCommerce?

A few, with catches. WoowBot’s and Amaya’s free versions both answer with AI on your own provider account (OpenAI, or Gemini for WoowBot), which bills you by use. Deacon’s free plan gives you 50 answers a month with nothing else to pay for, no card and no end date.

Can Deacon look up a WooCommerce order?

No. Deacon can’t see your WooCommerce admin, so it declines questions about one shopper’s order and asks for their email, so you can reply. It can send shoppers to the order tools WooCommerce gives them, such as /my-account/orders/ or an order tracking page, once your FAQ mentions them.

Will the chat show on my checkout page?

Yes, when the tag is in WPCode’s Footer box. WooCommerce’s checkout is an ordinary page, so WPCode’s footer loads there, but a block theme’s own footer doesn’t, because WooCommerce’s checkout template leaves it out. Shoppers can ask about delivery or returns at the last step, and the chat stays closed until they open it.

Does Deacon keep up when I change a product?

Not on its own, and here the plugins that sync your catalogue have the edge. Deacon answers from each page as it was when read, and nothing reads your store again on a schedule. After you change a price or a description, choose Re-fetch on that page in Knowledge Sources, then press Retrain agent. For products whose price or stock moves often, untick the page and let the product page say it.

What happens when Deacon’s free answers run out?

Shoppers still get a reply, a short one saying Deacon can’t look into that right now, and an invitation to leave their email unless they already have in that chat. Every conversation stays in your dashboard for you to answer. You’re never billed for going over, and the plan doesn’t upgrade itself.