Ecommerce

Answer shipping and returns questions before the cart is abandoned

The question standing between a full cart and a sale is almost never about the product. It is about when it arrives and what happens if it is wrong.

Start free Install on Shopify

No credit card. Two lines in your theme.

“When will it arrive if I order today?”

“How much is delivery to Ireland?”

“Can I return it if it doesn't fit?”

“Where is my order? It says dispatched.”

What an online shop actually gets asked

Both columns matter. The right-hand one is what a reader is really checking for, so it is on the page rather than in a footnote.

Answered from your own pages

The reply is the answer, with a link to the page it came from.

“When will it arrive if I order today?”
“How much is delivery to Ireland?”
“Can I return it if it doesn't fit?”
“Is this true to size?”
“Do you ship to a PO box?”

Handed to a person

Declined plainly, then routed with the whole conversation attached.

“Where is my order? It says dispatched.”
“Can you change the address on order 4471?”
“It arrived damaged — what happens now?”

Each of these arrives with the whole conversation attached, so whoever picks it up starts from what the customer already said rather than from a one-line message.

A phone face-down on a kitchen worktop beside a mug and keys, next to a folded delivery slip, late in the evening.

Checkout hesitation is a support problem

A shopper with a delivery question at 10pm has three options: find the policy page, write in and wait, or leave. Two of those cost you the order, and the third depends on your policy page being findable at exactly that moment.

Carts are abandoned at the shipping step rather than at the price
The same delivery-time question arrives dozens of times a week
Returns policy questions spike after every promotion
Peak season multiplies volume exactly when the team has least slack

You have already written most of it

Point the crawler at these four and the assistant has what it needs. There is nothing to re-author, and nothing to keep in sync afterwards.

01
Shipping & delivery
Rates, zones, cut-off times and courier windows.
02
Returns & exchanges
The window, the conditions, who pays postage.
03
Product & sizing guides
Fit, materials, care — the pre-purchase half.
04
FAQ and policy pages
Everything already written for the questions you kept getting.

The four questions that decide the order

When does it arrive, what does delivery cost, can I return it, and will it fit. All four are already answered somewhere on your site. The bot makes them answerable in the moment of hesitation, and links the policy page so the shopper can check the detail themselves.

Delivery and cut-offs: Answered from your published shipping page rather than from a guess about your courier.
Returns and exchanges: The actual window and conditions, cited, so nobody is surprised later.
Sizing and specification: Answers drawn from your product and guide pages, in the shopper's words.
Order-related escalation: Anything about a specific order reaches a human with the conversation attached.

Peak season without peak headcount

Ecommerce volume is spiky in a way most support teams cannot staff for. A bot that answers the repetitive share instantly means Black Friday inbound is triaged before anyone opens the queue, and hard daily caps mean the traffic spike cannot produce a surprise bill alongside it.

Never invent a delivery promise

The expensive failure in retail support is a confident wrong answer about arrival dates or refund eligibility, because the customer acts on it and the resolution costs you both the order and the goodwill. The bot answers only from your published policy and refuses outside it.

See it working

Go and interrogate a real shop.

LUMIÈRE is a demonstration storefront of ours — real products, a real shipping table, a real returns policy. The assistant on it has read those pages and nothing else, so every answer it gives is one you can check against the page it came from.

Open the demo store

Opens in a new tab. Nothing to sign up for, and nothing is for sale.

The LUMIÈRE storefront with the assistant open. Asked “What is your return window?”, it answers “You have 30 days from delivery to return an item. It must be unused and in its original packaging”, followed by two citation markers and a source chip reading “Returns & exchanges”. — A real exchange on that storefront. Two citations and the page they came from, exactly as they rendered.

Four things worth asking it

“What is your return window?”
Answers from the returns page, and links it
“Who pays for return shipping?”
Splits the answer — faulty vs changed your mind
“Is the stoneware dishwasher safe?”
Pulls the firing temperature off the care guide
“Do you gift wrap?”
Nothing on the site says. Watch it decline rather than guess

Answered at 10pm

The hesitation happens outside your hours far more often than inside them.

With the policy attached

A delivery answer that links your shipping page is one the shopper can act on.

Order questions reach a person

Anything about a specific order goes through with the conversation attached.

Peak season has a ceiling

A hard daily cap means Black Friday traffic cannot produce a surprise bill.

Where the line is

It cannot see inside your orders

This is the boundary worth being clear about before you install anything. The assistant answers from your published pages; it has no connection to your store's order records, so it can explain your dispatch times and your returns window but it cannot tell one shopper where their parcel is.

Policy and product questions: answered, with the page attached
“Where is order 4471”: escalated to a person, with the thread
Delivery dates are quoted from your page, never estimated
Refund eligibility comes from your policy, not from judgement

Which is the right split for retail anyway. A confident wrong answer about an arrival date costs you the order and the goodwill, and it is the one mistake customers do not forget.

A returns shelf in the back of a small retail business, open boxes on industrial shelving with a clipboard on a nail.

“How long does delivery take to Ireland?”

Answered · Shipping & delivery

“Where is order 4471?”

Not connected to your store

What shops ask before installing

Short answers. If yours is not here, the assistant on this page will try it — and tell you honestly if it cannot.

Can it look up a specific customer's order status?

It answers from your published content, so it can explain your shipping timelines and returns process but not the status of an individual order. Order-specific questions escalate to a human with the conversation attached.

Does it work with Shopify and WooCommerce?

Yes — it installs as two lines of script, so it works on any store platform that lets you add a snippet to your theme. There is nothing platform-specific about the install.

What happens during a traffic spike?

Per-visitor rate limits and a hard daily reply cap put a ceiling on cost regardless of volume. You set the ceiling in advance rather than discovering it on an invoice.

All solutions