ARLing Shopping Assistant for WooCommerce

Description

Add an AI chatbot to your WooCommerce store that answers shoppers’ questions from your own product catalogue and links the matching products. You switch it on inside WordPress in about a minute: no sign-up form, no API key, no credit card, and 100 conversations a month are free.

Connecting creates an ARLing account for your shop’s domain and contact e-mail. You can sign in to it at arling.sk with a code sent to that e-mail, but you never have to.

Shoppers ask in their own words (“do you have a waterproof jacket under 80 euros?”) and the assistant answers only from your products, with up to three matching products, their price and a link. You can talk to it on the settings page as soon as it is ready, before any shopper sees it.

What happens after you activate it

1. The setup screen opens. Your contact e-mail is filled in; you read what will be sent, tick the consent box and click Connect.
2. The assistant reads your public product list (the WooCommerce Store API your shop already serves). For a few hundred products this usually takes under a minute, and the page updates by itself.
3. When it is ready, the chat opens right on the settings page with example questions built from your own categories and products, and the chat bubble appears on your shop (within a few minutes if you have left the settings page).

If something stops it from reading your products (a firewall, password protection, a coming soon page, a switched off REST API, a shop with no products), the settings page says what it was and how to fix it, and has a Try again button. Shoppers do not see the bubble until it works: it appears only once the assistant is ready.

What it does

• Adds a chat bubble to your storefront that answers shopping questions from your product catalogue.
• Shows up to three matching products, with price and a link, next to each answer.
• Shows your shop’s name (your Site Title) at the top of the chat instead of a generic title, in light and dark mode. It comes from your own WordPress settings.
• Answers in Slovak, Czech, English and German. On a site in another language it answers each shopper in the language they write in.
• Reads your products again automatically once a day.
• Optional gift finder: a Find a gift tile in the chat asks three questions (for whom, what budget, what interests) and suggests up to five gifts from your own catalogue, each with one short reason. Off until you switch it on.
• Shows a short offer of help (“Need help choosing?”) next to the bubble once per browser tab, about five seconds after a page opens. The plugin has no setting to switch it off.
• The chat window has a small “Powered by ARLing Shopping Assistant” link to arling.sk.
• Takes its accent colour from your theme’s theme-color tag when it has a usable one, otherwise a dark red. The colour mode setting switches between light and dark.
• Does not store conversation content. ARLing keeps daily counts and a few account events for your shop, to apply your plan’s limits, control its own costs and help with setup; the full list is under External services.
• Nothing loads on your storefront until you connect your store on the settings page and the assistant is ready.

What it does not do

• It does not add products to the cart, place orders, apply coupons or look up orders. It answers and links to the product page.
• It is not a live chat with a person.
• It only knows what your public product list shows: the name, short description (or description), price, first category, photo and whether a product is in stock. It does not know delivery times or stock quantities.
• It cannot work on a local or staging copy that is not reachable from the internet (for example localhost, *.local, *.test or WordPress Playground), because the service reads your product list over the internet. The setup screen tells you before you connect.

Pricing

• Free: 100 conversations a month, no card, no time limit.
• Starter: 19 EUR a month for up to 1,000 conversations.
• Pro: 39 EUR a month for up to 3,000 conversations.

Daily limits: Free gives AI answers for about 40 questions a day, Starter for up to 400 and Pro for up to 1,200; above that, shoppers get the closest matching products without an AI answer (every number is in the FAQ under “What are the daily limits exactly?”).

A conversation is one shopper’s chat in one browser tab within 24 hours, however many questions it has, within those daily limits. The settings page shows how many you have used, and WordPress warns you at 80 % and 100 % (this needs the status key your site gets when it first creates the assistant; see the FAQ). When the monthly limit is reached, the chat tells new shoppers the assistant is resting and points them to your contact page, until the count starts again on the first day of the month or you move to a larger plan. The free plan never charges anything. Paid plans are paid through Stripe and renew monthly until you cancel them.

Setup guide and live demo: https://arling.sk/asistent/woocommerce/en/

External services

This plugin relies on the ARLing Shopping Assistant service to work. Provider: ARLing s. r. o., Bratislava, Slovakia (https://arling.sk). API and widget address: https://arling-asistent.arling.workers.dev (hosted on Cloudflare Workers).

When you click “Connect” on the settings page (only after ticking the consent checkbox), and again only if you click “Try again” after a failed setup, this plugin sends to the ARLing Shopping Assistant API:

• Your store’s public WooCommerce Store API product list URL (for example https://your-site/wp-json/wc/store/v1/products?per_page=100, or the ?rest_route= form on sites with plain permalinks), which is data your store already serves publicly to any visitor’s browser.
• Your site’s domain name.
• The contact e-mail address you enter on that screen.
• The language of your own WordPress profile as a two-letter code (sk, cs, en or de), so ARLing’s e-mails to you are in that language, and the fact that the account comes from this plugin.

Connecting creates an ARLing account for your shop’s domain and contact e-mail. You can sign in to it at arling.sk with a code sent to that e-mail to see your plan and usage, but you never have to. No customer data and no order data is ever sent by this plugin. Nothing is sent before you connect. Like every request WordPress makes, these requests also carry the WordPress version and your site’s address in the user agent.

E-mails to the address you enter: right now ARLing sends no automatic e-mails, only a sign-in code when you ask for one at arling.sk; the settings page shows everything instead. When automatic e-mails are switched on, ARLing may send the setup instructions once the products are read (or one message explaining why they could not be read), and at most three service messages about this assistant: a confirmation when it first loads on your site, one offer of help if it does not, and a notice at 80 % of the free monthly limit. They go only to an address on your site’s domain or one you have confirmed with a sign-in code. Each e-mail says why it was sent and has a link that stops all further ones. Nothing else, no newsletters.

While connected:

• The plugin asks the service for your assistant’s status (GET /v1/tenants/{id}/status: whether it is ready, why a setup failed, plan and conversations used this month) when you open the settings page, every two minutes through WP-Cron for at most an hour after you click Connect or Try again (until the assistant is ready or the setup has failed), and otherwise through WP-Cron at most twice a day. That is how it shows the chat bubble once the assistant is ready, hides it when the setup failed or the service no longer knows your shop, and warns you before the free limit runs out. The request carries only your assistant’s id and, if your site has one, the status key the service gave it when you connected. Deactivating the plugin stops these checks.
• The widget script is loaded from ARLing’s servers (https://arling-asistent.arling.workers.dev/widget.js, or a self-hosted URL if you use the arling_asistent_widget_endpoint filter) on the storefront pages you choose once the assistant is ready, and on the plugin’s own settings page for the “Try it now” preview. Its script tag also carries your Site Title, which the widget only shows at the top of the chat; it does not send it to ARLing. Like any script request, the shopper’s browser also sends the address of the page it is on; the service uses it only to note the first time the widget loads on your shop’s domain.
• In the shopper’s browser the widget uses no cookies and no localStorage. In sessionStorage, which the browser clears when the tab is closed, it keeps a random id for the tab (created when the page loads) and, after the first answer, a signed conversation token; both are sent only with chat messages. It also notes there that the offer of help was shown.
• When a shopper (or you, in the preview) uses the chat, the question and the answer go between the shopper’s browser and this same service only to generate a reply; the service does not store that conversation content.

What ARLing records about your shop, and why:

• Your account: the domain, contact e-mail, product list address, language, plan and the note that it comes from this plugin, to run your assistant and to reach you about it.
• A copy of your public product list (name, description, price, first category, link, photo and whether it is in stock) and a search index made from it, read again once a day, so that the assistant can answer.
• For each conversation, for about a day: a marker made from a random id with the number of questions so far, so that one chat counts once; never the questions themselves.
• Daily counts per shop: conversations, conversations from your own site, answered questions, AI cost (tokens and compute units) and replies without AI. They apply your plan’s monthly and daily limits and let ARLing control its AI costs.
• Account events with their date: the account was created (with the language and the note that it comes from this plugin), the products were read or why they could not be, the widget first loaded on your domain, the first shopper question, regular use (enough conversations from your own site over 14 days), 80 % and 100 % of the monthly limit, plan changes, and e-mails sent or stopped. They help ARLing with your setup, decide which service e-mail is due, and feed ARLing’s internal notifications to its own team, which carry your shop’s domain and the event.
• Per shopper network: how many questions, AI answers and new conversations it had with your shop today, kept under a number derived from the network address with a daily secret, never the address itself. This applies the per-network limits (FAQ: “What are the daily limits exactly?”).

Version 1.0 of the Data Processing Agreement (article 4) also mentions a daily count of clicks on products; the service does not record such clicks, and nothing above includes them.

Upgrading: the upgrade buttons on the settings page link to Stripe Checkout (a payment page hosted by Stripe, https://stripe.com), with your assistant’s id attached so your plan updates automatically after a successful payment. The “Manage or cancel your subscription” link opens the Stripe customer portal. No payment details ever pass through this plugin or through ARLing’s own servers.

Use of this service is subject to ARLing’s:

• Terms of Service: https://arling.sk/podmienky/en/
• Privacy Policy: https://arling.sk/privacy/en/ and https://arling.sk/gdpr/en/
• Data Processing Agreement (GDPR Art. 28), English translation: https://arling.sk/asistent/dpa/en/ (the Slovak original, linked from that page, prevails)

You can disconnect at any time from the settings page, which immediately stops the widget from loading on your site. Disconnecting does not delete data already held by ARLing: write to support@arling.sk to have it deleted (article 8 of the Data Processing Agreement says what is deleted). The plugin keeps this site’s status key when you disconnect, so that connecting the same assistant again still shows your plan and usage; deleting the plugin removes it.