FAQ chat vs AI chat: what WooCommerce merchants should actually know

Every chat product for e-commerce now says “AI”. Some of them mean a large language model reading your catalog and composing answers. Some mean a decision tree with a sparkle icon. Merchants deserve a clearer map, so here is ours — including where our own product sits.

Two different tools

Rule-based FAQ chat matches what a shopper types against trigger phrases you wrote, returns the answer you wrote, and — in Wow Chat’s case — falls back to a keyword search of your catalog when nothing matches. It is:

• Predictable. It never invents a product, a price or a policy.
• Fast and cheap. No model call, no per-message cost, works offline from any vendor.
• Limited by your phrasing. If nobody wrote a trigger for “when will it get here”, “how long does shipping take” won’t fire unless the phrases are similar enough.

AI (LLM) chat sends the shopper’s message, plus context from your catalog and policies, to a model that composes a reply. It is:

• Flexible. It understands “something warm for a rainy trek, size 10” without anyone anticipating that sentence.
• Conversational. Follow-ups keep context; comparisons and recommendations come naturally.
• Costly and fallible. Every message costs tokens, latency is higher, and without careful grounding the model can be confidently wrong.

Neither is “the good one”. They are good at different things.

Where Wow Chat for Woo is today

The free plugin is rule-based and local — deliberately. Trigger-phrase FAQ answers, keyword catalog search, live product cards, add-to-cart in the conversation. The only model involved is the optional AI FAQ Generator, which uses your own OpenAI key to draft FAQ entries you then review. That is AI doing the tedious part (writing paraphrases and evergreen answers) while the shopper-facing chat stays deterministic and free.

We think that is the right default for most stores: you get most of the value of “a chat that knows my products” with none of the per-message cost or hallucination risk.

What changes with Pro

Wow Chat Pro adds the LLM layer on top: an AI chatbot that understands intent, smarter search and recommendations, and priority support. A few design decisions we have already made:

• AI usage is included in the licence with fair-use limits — no per-message meter, because we don’t think merchants should be punished for a busy December.
• It is still a WordPress plugin. Conversations and analytics stay in your database.
• The free layer is the fallback. If the AI service is unreachable, chat answers from your FAQ entries and catalog search. Your store never goes quiet.
• Pro is optional. The free plugin stays free, with no message caps and no time limit.

We don’t have a launch date to announce. If you want one email when early access opens, join the waitlist.

How to decide

Ask three questions about your store:

1. Are most questions repetitive? Shipping, returns, sizing, “is it in stock”. Rule-based chat plus good FAQ entries handles these perfectly — and the analytics dashboard tells you which entries to write next.
2. Do shoppers describe needs rather than products? “A gift for a cyclist under fifty” is an intent, not a keyword. That is where AI chat earns its keep.
3. What is your tolerance for a wrong answer? Regulated products, complex compatibility, medical claims — be careful with generative answers and keep a human-written FAQ layer underneath.

Most stores should start with the first and add the second when the questions justify it. That is the path the free plugin and Pro are designed to follow together.