Introducing Wow Chat for Woo

Shoppers who can’t find what they want leave. That sentence is the whole reason Wow Chat for Woo exists.

We build WordPress and WooCommerce products for clients, and the same two problems kept showing up in every store we touched. First, WooCommerce’s default search: it runs LIKE queries against the posts table, so “boots” won’t find “boot” and a SKU typo returns nothing. Second, the questions — shipping, returns, sizing — asked at 11 pm when nobody is there to answer, by people who are ready to buy.

The usual fix is a hosted chat widget. Those can be excellent. They also come with an account to create, a per-seat or per-message bill that grows with your success, and a copy of your shoppers’ conversations in someone else’s cloud. For most WooCommerce stores that felt like the wrong trade.

What we shipped instead

Wow Chat for Woo is a plugin, not a service with a WordPress wrapper. Everything runs on your server:

• A chatbot and product finder — as a floating bubble, a slide-in drawer or a full-screen finder. It answers from FAQ entries you write, falls back to your catalog, and shows product cards with image, price, stock state and a working add-to-cart button.
• Instant search — a dedicated index table with MySQL FULLTEXT ranking. Results as you type, word forms understood, exact SKUs first, in-stock products ahead of out-of-stock.
• An FAQ system — trigger phrases and answers, with products, categories, tags, brands, sale or featured items attached.
• Recommendation widgets — Recently Viewed, Related Products and Frequently Bought Together, each a Gutenberg block.
• Analytics — conversations, answered rate, top questions, top searches, product clicks. Stored locally.

There is no account, no API key and no trial clock. Install, configure, done.

What “free” means here

Everything above is free with no message caps and no time limit. We are building a separate Pro plugin with an AI chatbot that understands shopper intent, and it will be optional. It will not take anything away from the free plugin — the free plugin is the foundation Pro builds on.

Where the AI is (and isn’t)

We want to be precise about this because a lot of “AI chat” marketing isn’t. Today the chat is rule-based and local: trigger phrases plus keyword search. It is fast, predictable and it never invents a product or a price. The one place a model is involved is the optional AI FAQ Generator, which drafts FAQ entries from your catalog using an OpenAI key you supply yourself — and your server talks to OpenAI directly, not through us. Leave the key blank and nothing leaves your site.

The full AI chatbot is coming in Pro. Join the waitlist if you want one email when it opens.

Try it

Wow Chat for Woo is on WordPress.org. Start with the getting started guide, and tell us what you think in the support forum — we’re a small team and we read everything.