How to Set Up ChatLab for Your E‑Commerce Store: A Step‑by‑Step Guide

How to Set Up ChatLab for Your E‑Commerce Store: A Step‑by‑Step Guide

In today’s on‑demand e‑commerce landscape, customers expect instant, personalized assistance. A 24/7 AI chatbot is no longer a nice‑to‑have—it’s essential. ChatLab answers questions, guides purchases, and automates support around the clock. This guide walks you through teaching, integrating, and optimising ChatLab so it becomes a revenue‑generating member of your team.

Why Your Store Needs a Chatbot

• Instant answers, any time – meet customer expectations and keep them engaged.
• Higher satisfaction & conversions – quick and accurate responses are crucial for customers.
• Reduced support workload – let the bot handle FAQs while your team tackles more complex cases.

Imagine your store never sleeps. With ChatLab, every visitor receives an immediate, tailored response, freeing your team for high‑value tasks.

Step 1 – Teach ChatLab About Your Store

1. Scan your website

ChatLab crawls every page—product descriptions, FAQs, policies—to build a foundational knowledge base.
2. Start with one language for large catalogues If you host hundreds of products and your website is multilingual, train in English first by limiting scan URLs to /en in Advanced Settings ▸ Include only URLs that contain. ChatLab auto‑translates queries in other languages. 3. Optimise character usage Exclude marketing archives, blog tags, or other low‑value pages to stay within your training‑character quota. See the detailed guide on reducing characters, here: https://help.chatlab.com/how-to-reduce-training-characters-when-scanning-a-website-in-chatlab

Step 2 – Connect ChatLab to Your E‑Commerce Platform

ChatLab offers plug‑and‑play connectors for Shopify, WooCommerce, and more systems.

1. In Integrations, paste your store URL, customer key, and secret key.
2. The bot now reads live product data—prices, stock, and specs—and can fetch order status in real time.
3. If you decide to do integration, please higher up your AI model!

How to keep your training data up-to-date?

Static Retraining:

What does static retraining mean? Static retraining is a manual way to retrain your chatbot. If you want to keep your training data up-to-date you can set up your retraining for either daily, weekly, or monthly intervals.

Dynamic integration:

Thanks to connecting your chatbot to systems such as Woocommerce or Shopify we can get current information about your store. Dynamic product integration is a great option if your products change from time to time or if new product lines are released frequently. It's a really convenient way to keep your training data up-to-date.

Scanning vs Integration: Which Is Better?

Method	Pros	Cons
Website Scan	Full context AI research, rich answers	Static- requires retrain to capture new products
API Integration	Always up-to-date prices & stock, order look-ups	Keyword-based search only, no rich context

The Winning Formula: Combine Both

Enable website scan and keep the integration active. Add a system prompt such as:

-When a user asks about products or product categories, always use available tools/functions to retrieve the relevant information first. Do not rely on a provided knowledge base to answer such questions directly.

-After retrieving the product or category data via tools/functions, you may enhance the response with additional information from the knowledge base if and only if it is relevant and consistent with the retrieved data.

-For each product extracted from the e-commerce system always display name, price and a picture if available and a link to the product page

-Never display more than three products, in case more than three products are available ask for criteria to narrow down the search

Step 3 – Enable Customer‑Centric Features

• Suggested questions: Pre‑populate quick‑reply chips (shipping, returns, opening hours) under Settings ▸ Conversation.
• Human hand‑off: Activate the Contact Human form and provide your support email for escalations.

Step 4 – Customize chatbot for your needs

• Customise tone in Role & Behaviour – friendly, witty, formal—your call.
• Improve chatbot responses with our guide: https://help.chatlab.com/how-to-improve-chatbot-responses

Step 5 – Maintain & Optimise

• Review conversation logs weekly. Fine‑tune answers or add content where the bot hesitates.
• Leverage the automated Daily Activity Report—spot trends, track top questions, and iterate.
• You can generate conversation summaries and AI Insights on demand, whenever you want.

How about languages?

Our system supports over 90 languages so language barrier has never been a problem for us. If you have any problems with configuration of languages, we can recommend you our article on how to deal with languages in ChatLab: https://help.chatlab.com/chatbot-language-setup

You can change the language in which your chatbot will respond by writing a custom instruction in “Role & Behavior” settings. You will have two ways to do write it:

1. "Output in [Your Language], do not switch to user's language"
2. "Output in [Your Language], unless user uses another language - in that case adjust to user"

In our settings we have also an option to change the language of generated summaries and AI insights. It's called “Internal language” and you can change it in the “Model & advanced” section.

Remember that if you have scanned your website and did integration, you should write a prompt that will solve any language problems, that can happen:

-When searching for products use [your shop’s language] product names and [your shop’s language] category names. When searching, use singular form and not plural.

Step 6 – Add the Widget to Your Site

1. Copy the embed snippet from the **“Add to website” **section.
2. Paste it into your site’s head> (or via tag manager).
3. Refresh the page—ChatLab is live!

Summary

By blending deep knowledge, real‑time data, and proactive optimisation, ChatLab delivers a fast, human‑like shopping experience that lifts conversions and slashes support costs. Welcome to the future of customer service.