About this plugin
My Observer AI Shopping Assistant adds a chat box to your WooCommerce store. ”) and get answers based on your own products and the documents you upload, not on guesses from the internet.
How it works for you, the store owner:
- Search is free. Finding the right products for a question works through MyObserver at no cost. You connect it with one click in the plugin settings.
- Chat uses your own AI key. Answers are written by OpenAI or Claude using an API key from your own account, so you pay the AI provider directly. With gpt-4o-mini that is about $1 per 1,000 chats.
- You stay in control. Choose the provider and model, cap how long answers can be, and limit how many messages one visitor or your whole site can send.
- It never breaks. If smart search is not connected, or the service is busy, the chat falls back to normal keyword search of your catalog for that question.
This plugin is designed for merchants who want:
* Product-aware chat that can reference your catalog content
* Optional document-aware answers (shipping, sizing, care guides) linked to WooCommerce products
* A simple setup flow inside wp-admin
* Protection against runaway AI costs (answer length cap and message limits)
* A choice of OpenAI or Claude for the chat answers
How it works at a high level:
1. Your WooCommerce products are indexed. The text is turned into search vectors by the MyObserver search service (after you click Connect) and stored on your own site.
2. Optional TXT, CSV, DOCX, and text-based PDF files can be uploaded into the Product Intelligence Engine.
3. A shopper’s question is matched against your products and documents.
4. Your chosen AI provider (OpenAI or Claude, with your own key) writes the final answer from what was found.
The storefront chat widget can be embedded with a shortcode or auto-injected in the footer, and the admin experience includes a modern settings screen for provider settings, limits and document management.
Features
- Embedded storefront chat widget ( [myobserver_rag_widget] shortcode, legacy [rag_bot_widget], or footer auto-inject)
- Free smart search through MyObserver (opt-in, one-click Connect)
- Automatic keyword-search fallback when smart search is off or unavailable
- OpenAI or Claude for chat answers, using your own API key
- Answer length cap (100 to 2000 tokens, default 500)
- Message limits per visitor (default 20 per 10 minutes) and per site (default 300 per hour)
- Local vector storage and product indexing on your own server
- Product Intelligence Engine for document uploads, document-product linking, reindexing, and queue review
- TXT, CSV, DOCX, and text-based PDF ingest support
- “Rebuild index” action in the settings screen
Bundled build artifacts:
– This plugin ships compiled Angular assets in assets/settings-ui/browser/.
com/darrisb/woo-rag
– Build command example: npm ci && npm run build
Usage
Storefront widget:
* Add [myobserver_rag_widget] where you want chat to render.
* If Auto Inject is enabled, chat can render in wp_footer.
Indexing:
* Go to My Observer.
* Connect smart search, then use Rebuild index to queue indexing for all products and documents.
Documents:
* Go to My Observer.
* In the Product Intelligence Engine section, upload TXT, CSV, DOCX, or text-based PDF files.
* Review linked products, update links, and queue document reindexing as needed.
External services
This plugin can connect to third-party services based on your configuration.
- OpenAI API ( https://api.openai.com )
* Used for: chat answers when OpenAI is selected as the chat provider, and for listing the models available to your key.
* Data sent: your OpenAI API key (to OpenAI only) and the shopper’s question with the product and document context needed to write the answer.
com/policies/terms-of-use/
com/policies/privacy-policy/
- Anthropic API ( https://api.anthropic.com )
* Used for: chat answers when Claude is selected as the chat provider, and for listing the models available to your key.
* Data sent: your Claude API key (to Anthropic only) and the shopper’s question with the product and document context needed to write the answer.
com/legal/commercial-terms
com/legal/privacy
- MyObserver API ( https://api.myobserver.io )
* Used for: free smart search. It runs only after an administrator clicks Connect in the plugin settings; until then nothing is sent and the site uses keyword search.
* Data sent when connecting: the site URL, the administrator email address and the plugin version. To prove you own the site, the service fetches a one-time code from /wp-json/myobserver-rag/v1/search-verify on your site; that route returns nothing except for a code that is valid for a few minutes.
* Data sent afterwards: product text, document text and shopper questions, so the service can turn them into search vectors. Your OpenAI or Claude key is never sent to MyObserver.
* Once a day while connected the plugin also checks the connection status and your daily usage.
io/terms
io/privacy
Privacy
Review the included privacy policy template and update site policy text as needed for your deployment. Chat rate limiting uses a one-way hash of the visitor’s connection address with a site-specific salt; the address itself is never stored.