How to Give a WordPress AI Assistant Access to Product Data
Connect Niwa's customer assistant to accurate WooCommerce products, prices, stock and variations. Verify product answers and the selected cart item.
To give a WordPress AI assistant access to product data with Niwa, use your WooCommerce catalog as the source for product records, prepare its descriptions and variations, and complete Niwa's site indexing. Test the public assistant against a specific product and variation. Customer product lookup does not require giving visitors administrator access or sharing your store's API credentials with them.
An assistant needs more than product names to answer buying questions. "Does this blue shirt come in medium?" depends on a particular variation, its price and its stock state. A description of the parent shirt alone cannot establish whether that option is available.
Prepare a product record customers can understand
Open the product in Products → All Products. Check its name, public description, image and the attributes relevant to a buying decision. Include supported facts about material, dimensions, fit or care. Do not ask the assistant to invent missing specifications.
Use names that distinguish similar products. If two items have nearly identical titles, include the model or another meaningful identifier. A SKU helps identify a record internally; a customer also needs a description they can recognise.
Confirm that the intended customer product is published and available through your normal storefront. Investigate an unpublished, hidden or incomplete item before treating it as a chatbot retrieval failure. The Niwa setup handbook includes product-index troubleshooting.
Keep price and stock in the appropriate WooCommerce fields
For a simple product, review the product's General and Inventory settings. Check its regular price, any sale price and the stock-management choice. Save the product and inspect what the public store displays.
WooCommerce distinguishes a stock status from tracking a stock quantity. Choose the settings that reflect how your store operates, including whether backorders are permitted. Do not put "always available" in a chat rule if the catalog actually tracks limited stock.
WooCommerce's product editor documentation explains these fields. Your displayed currency, taxes and shipping conditions also need to make sense to the buyer. A product's listed amount is not automatically the total cost of the eventual order.
Avoid making a copied price in an FAQ the only source for a current product price. That duplicate will become stale when the catalog changes.
Check each variation separately
For a variable product, review Product data → Attributes and Variations. Confirm that the options customers can select correspond to real variations, with their own required price and stock information.
A parent product can remain available while one size is unavailable. Check the actual size and colour combination the customer asks for. A general "in stock" message for the parent is not enough to promise every option.
The WooCommerce variable-product guide describes variation-level prices and inventory. Follow it when creating or repairing records; adding a variation name to a text paragraph does not create the corresponding purchasable variation.
For an illustrative test, use a blue shirt with two sizes and make the availability of each explicit in your test catalog. Ask about one available size and one unavailable size. Compare the reply with those exact records.
Connect the catalog to Niwa's customer workflow
With Niwa installed on the existing WordPress store, verify the selected customer-chat model. Run Run Full Index + Embeddings in Main Settings and inspect the progress and any errors.
In Frontend Agent Rules, describe your offerings, comparison priorities and customer-help boundaries. For example, tell the assistant to explain relevant differences, ask for the required size when it is missing and avoid promising an unavailable option. Save the rules.
Niwa can recommend and compare WooCommerce products, show product cards and help shoppers choose options through its storefront assistant. The catalog provides the underlying product facts. The rules explain how to use those facts in a useful conversation.
For a catalog-only website, review Catalog mode – show View Details only in UI Settings. That setting gives product cards a route to the product page rather than presenting a purchasing action for a site that is not acting as a shop.
Verify the answer and the selected cart item
Open the public chat in a private browser window. Identify a product naturally and check that Niwa finds the intended item. Ask about a particular variation, then ask a follow-up about a descriptive feature such as material.
Inspect the card's name, image, price and available options. If your store uses the supported cart flow, select an option and check the resulting cart line. Verify the item, variation, quantity and amount there. Merely receiving a product recommendation does not prove that the correct variation reached the cart.
Use a controlled test product or stop before payment when testing a real item. Do not count a test cart as a completed customer purchase.
After changing a catalog record, repeat the affected question in a fresh conversation and compare the result with the newly saved record. If the product page and assistant disagree, trace the specific field and variation instead of rewriting the whole conversation profile.
Keep customer access separate from store management
Product assistance and product administration have different permissions. A customer asking about stock should receive buying information, not access to edit inventory, prices or orders. Do not expose an administrator token or API key in the frontend to make product lookup work.
Niwa's safety guidance explains the connected-service and access considerations. If setup needs attention, contact Niwa with a public product URL, the affected variation and the answer you expected. Leave credentials and private order information out of the example.
