Chatonio

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Ecommerce

Support for your shop that answers from the order, not a script.

“Where is my order?” The AI opens the real record and answers in seconds — the status, what shipped, the carrier’s date. Your operators keep the conversations that need a person.

Free to try · no credit card · order and stock lookups on a paid plan

The inbox

What actually fills a shop’s inbox.

Three questions, over and over. Every one of them is already answered somewhere in your shop — and the third one isn’t a support ticket at all, it’s a sale you either make or don’t.

Swipe — 3 of them

The question you answer more than any other

“Where is my order?” The answer is already sitting in the order record and the carrier’s tracking. Somebody copies it out of one tab and into another, all day — and the customer waited three hours for a line of text.

The return question you can’t get wrong

“Can I still send this back?” Answer it too generously and you’ve given away a refund you never owed. Get it wrong the other way and it’s a chargeback, or a one-star review that stays up for a year.

The one that isn’t a support ticket

“Is this in stock in medium?” Nobody waits for that. They ask, they get silence, and they buy it somewhere else — a slow answer here doesn’t cost you a ticket, it costs you the order.

Grounded

Every answer comes from your shop, not from a script.

Connect your store once and the AI looks up the real record before it writes a word — the order, the tracking, whether the size they want is actually on the shelf.

Your API becomes a tool
Hand it the endpoint your own order page already calls. When a customer types an order number, the AI calls it too, and answers from what came back — not from what it assumes a shop like yours would say.
No API? It reads the page
Plenty of shops have no endpoint to hand out. Point it at the tracking page, the delivery page or the returns policy instead and it fetches those. Same grounding, same audit, nothing for anyone to build.
Reading is automatic. Changing can ask first.
Looking an order up happens on its own. For anything that changes one — cancelling it, starting a return, issuing a refund — you turn on confirmation, and the AI stops, asks the customer in plain words, and waits for a clear yes before it runs.
Your systems
Your order databaseAPI
Your carrier trackingAPI
Your returns policyKB
Your product FAQKB
Chatonio AI
Order 5512 · shipped today · arriving Thursday
Read from the order and the carrier
Marlowe & Co support
Web chat · 11:02
I ordered three weeks ago and it still hasn’t turned up
AII can check that right now — what’s the order number?
5512
AIFound it. Order 5512 — the charcoal merino crew in medium, plus two pairs of socks. It was held on the crew, which came back into stock Monday, and the whole order went out this morning.
The carrier’s tracking has it arriving Thursday. That’s their estimate, not mine — if it slips, that page will know before I do.
ok. it’s a gift and I ordered it ages ago, so am I even still inside the return window? and will you cover the return postage, given how long it took
Escalated to an operator · 11:06
AIYour 30 days run from delivery, not from the order date — the clock starts the day it actually lands, whenever that turns out to be. That’s straight from the returns policy. Covering the postage isn’t in there, and it isn’t mine to grant. Someone has been paged and will pick this up here.
See it

One late order, and the one thing it wouldn’t promise.

The order, the delay and the delivery date all come out of your own systems — the AI reads them, it doesn’t invent them. The end is the more useful part: the customer asks for something the returns policy doesn’t grant, and the AI doesn’t grant it either.

Four things happened there. It asked for the order number instead of guessing at one. It read the record itself — and gave the carrier’s estimate as the carrier’s, not as a promise. It answered the part the returns policy covers and stopped dead at the part it doesn’t. And it only mentioned a person after one had actually been paged.

Illustrative conversation. The AI answers from your own data — it will not state a status, a price or a date that nothing backs up.

Build one from your own store
Guardrails

What it is told never to say.

Accuracy is what every vendor claims. This is the shorter list — the things this one is told never to say in your shop, and the layer that catches it if it says one anyway.

Swipe — 4 rules

told never to

It won’t invent a delivery date

It reads the carrier’s estimate and gives it as the carrier’s, or it says it doesn’t have one. “Should be there Thursday” is the sentence that writes tomorrow’s angry follow-up, and it is not allowed to say it.

enforced by the platform

It won’t say the parcel shipped

Or that a refund has gone through, or that a return was received. A status or an amount that nothing in your data supports is blocked before it is sent — whatever the assistant was told, and however the customer asked.

told never to

It won’t bend your returns policy

No goodwill discount, no waived postage, no “I’ll make an exception this once.” It answers what your policy says and hands the exception to a person, because giving away money is your call and not a bot’s.

told never to

It won’t guess whether something is in stock

If a lookup can answer it, it answers from the lookup. If nothing can, it says so plainly. What it will not do is turn “probably” into “yes, we have that in medium” — and leave you cancelling the order that answer just won you.

The first, third and fourth are instructions your assistant follows. The second is enforced by the platform: a status or an amount that nothing in your data supports is blocked before it is sent, whatever the assistant was told.

not sentGood news — your refund has already been processed, it should be back on your card in 3 to 5 working days.
Blocked — nothing in your data says the refund was issued
Your return is logged against order 5512, but I can’t tell you the refund has been issued — nothing on my side says it has. I’ve passed this on, and someone will pick it up here.

The first message is what an ungrounded assistant sends to close a refund thread. It never reached the customer. The second one did. Every block is written to an audit log and the conversation is escalated — so you find out, not your customer.

It’s checked after it’s written
Every draft is audited against the evidence — the lookup it just ran, the customer’s own messages, your knowledge base — before it is saved or sent. An order number, a date, an amount: each one has to trace back to something.
When the check fails, it stays silent
If the audit blocks the reply, or errors, or can’t read it, that draft is never sent. What the customer gets instead is a line that claims nothing the evidence doesn’t back, and an operator on the way — never a confident guess about where somebody’s parcel is.
It can’t promise a person it hasn’t paged
“Someone will get back to you” is not a sentence it can write on its own. The system escalates and pages a real operator first, and only then is the customer told a person is coming.
Around the clock

Your checkout is open at midnight. So is the assistant.

The AI takes every new conversation from the first message — it isn’t cover for when your staff are out. And a chat somebody claimed and then left is worse than one nobody touched: nothing else is going to pick it up.

It answers before anyone is online
A new conversation belongs to the AI from the first message. Nobody has to be on shift for a customer to get a real answer about a real order at half past eleven on a Sunday.
A timer you set
Five minutes by default. If a claimed conversation sits that long with no reply — someone opened it, then the shop got busy — the assistant comes back in and carries on.
Every reply restarts the clock
The timer resets every time an operator sends a message, so a conversation somebody is actively answering doesn’t get talked over. And whether the AI steps back in at all is a setting: always, only when nobody’s online, or never.
The customer asks
“Where is my order? I ordered three weeks ago.”
The AI looks up the order and answersanswers in seconds
Status, what shipped and the carrier’s expected date — read from your own record.
Needs a person?
Your escalation rules, a refund somebody has to decide, or an operator who went quiet — here’s what happens next:
No
Answered from the order, and the conversation closes itself.
Yes
An operator is paged first — and only then is the customer told a person is coming.
Setup

Point it at your shop. It writes the knowledge base.

The first hour is usually why this never gets done. Here it’s a paste, and then an afternoon reading what it wrote.

Swipe — 3 steps

1

Paste your URL

It reads your public pages — your delivery page, your returns policy, your size guide, your FAQ — and writes real knowledge-base articles and real FAQ entries, plus a first draft of your assistant’s instructions, in your language.

2

Nothing it can’t prove

The articles are your own pages, in your own words. Where it draws a conclusion about your shop it has to point at the exact sentence that supports it — anything it can’t, it drops rather than guesses.

3

Connect your order lookup

Bring the endpoint your own order page already calls and we wire the lookup with you. Nothing to hand out? Point it at the tracking page instead and it reads that.

Channels

The question arrives wherever the customer already is.

Web chat, WhatsApp, Telegram, Viber, email and a hosted helpdesk, with the same assistant, the same knowledge base and the same order lookup behind every one of them. It all lands in one inbox, so nobody has to check four places to find out whether the customer was already answered.

Ecommerce FAQ

Questions, answered.

Black Friday triples my volume for a week. What happens?
Nobody waits for a free operator. The plan counts operators, channels and projects, never how many customers write in, so a spike lands on the AI instead of backing up behind the two people you have. Replies are still queued work — each one waits a few seconds for the customer to finish typing, and a heavy minute is a slower one — so a surge stretches the wait rather than stopping it. The real constraint that week is spend: AI usage runs down a prepaid balance, so top it up before the week rather than during it, because an empty balance hands every conversation straight back to your operators.
Will it give away a refund or waive postage to keep someone happy?
It has nothing to give away. It answers from your returns policy as written, and a discount, a waived postage cost or any other figure your own material does not contain is blocked before it is sent — it cannot invent a number to smooth somebody over. Refund appeals and requests for an exception are on the default list of things that go to a person; if you want a harder line than that, you write it into your assistant’s instructions yourself.
A customer sends a photo of a smashed mug. Can it do anything with that?
Yes, if you turn it on: you pick a model that reads images on the project, and from then on a photo the customer sends is described for the assistant, so the reply is about the actual damage rather than a generic line about returns. That description is what the AI reads, not something your operators see — what lands in your inbox is the photo itself. And it does not settle the claim: whoever decides is looking at exactly what the customer sent.
It told someone an item was in stock and it wasn’t. What then?
It does not invent a number. A quantity, a price or a delivery date that nothing in the evidence supports — the lookup it just ran, the customer’s own messages, your knowledge base — is blocked before it is sent, written to a log, and the conversation goes to a person. The honest limit runs the other way: it cannot tell you your own data is stale. If your endpoint says four in stock, it will say four in stock, so selling what you haven’t got is fixed in your stock feed, not in the assistant.
Half my orders come from marketplaces. Does it help there?
Not inside the marketplace. Chatonio does not plug into Amazon, eBay or Etsy seller messaging — a buyer who writes through the marketplace stays in the marketplace’s own inbox, and you answer them there. Where it does help is everywhere else those same buyers turn up: if the order is in your own back office, one lookup answers it whether they came to your site chat, Telegram or WhatsApp.
I sell into five countries. Do I have to write my returns policy five times?
It answers in whatever language the customer writes in, from their first message, working off what you have already written. For the wording that has to be exact — return rights, delivery windows, warranty — don’t retype anything: open the article, have the AI draft that language’s version, read it, and save it. From then on that saved version is what the answer is built from in that market. Which matters, because a returns clause rendered on the fly is not the same thing as one you approved.

Stop answering “where is my order?” by hand.

Point it at your shop and it writes its own knowledge base — free to try, no credit card.

See pricing