For a South African online store, the highest-value thing AI does is answer the pre-purchase question that would otherwise become an abandoned cart. "Do you deliver to Kimberley?", "How long does it take?", "Can I return it if it does not fit?", "Is this in stock in a medium?" — these are asked at the moment of hesitation, and an answer thirty seconds later is worth far more than one the next morning.
What does an e-commerce chatbot actually answer?
- Delivery. Where you deliver, what it costs, how long it takes to a main centre versus a smaller town, and whether there is a courier surcharge. This is the single most-asked question on South African stores and the one most likely to lose a sale.
- Stock and sizing, from your own catalogue rather than a guess.
- Returns and exchanges, including what the Consumer Protection Act entitles the buyer to, stated the way your own policy states it.
- Payment options — card, EFT, PayFast, Ozow, whatever you actually accept.
- "Where is my order?", which is the highest-volume post-purchase question and the most tedious for a human to answer.
Where does a South African store lose the sale?
| Moment | Without an answer | With one |
|---|---|---|
| "Do you deliver to my town?" | Cart abandoned | Answered from your delivery zones |
| Sizing doubt | Cart abandoned | Sizing guide, in the chat |
| Return policy doubt | Cart abandoned | Your policy, quoted plainly |
| "Where is my order?" at 22:00 | Support ticket, answered tomorrow | Answered, or escalated with the order number |
| Load-shedding during checkout | Session lost | Bot is in the cloud; the buyer is on their phone |
Does it plug into Shopify or WooCommerce?
It goes on any site as a single script tag, so the platform barely matters for the answering part. Reading live stock and order status is the part that depends on your platform: if your store exposes an API for it, the bot can look up an order; if not, it takes the order number and routes it to a person, which is still faster than an email queue. Be wary of anyone who claims live stock lookup on every platform without asking which one you run.
What does it cost?
A single store is a Starter build at R299 a month plus R250 once-off — R549 at checkout. Stores with a big catalogue, several delivery zones and order-status lookups usually run Pro at R1 199 a month. All in rands, month to month, with no contract — which matters more than it sounds when the alternative is a dollar-priced tool that reprices itself every time the rand moves.
What about abandoned carts?
Recovering an abandoned cart means emailing somebody who left, and that is email marketing rather than a chatbot — our email tool starts at R1 299 a month and is opt-in only, with POPIA handled. It is worth doing, but it is second-best: preventing the abandonment by answering the question is cheaper than chasing the person afterwards, and it does not depend on them having given you an email address before they left.
What must the bot never do?
Never invent stock. Never invent a delivery date. Never guess a price. A confident wrong answer about whether something is in stock produces a cancelled order and a bad review, which costs more than the sale was worth. Grounding it in your own catalogue and letting it say "let me check" is not a weakness — it is the whole design.
The cart was not abandoned because the price was wrong. It was abandoned because nobody could tell them whether it would reach Upington before the weekend.
Where should a small store start?
Write down the five questions your support inbox answers most. If four of them are answerable from information you already publish, a chatbot will pay for itself quickly. If most of your volume is complex returns and disputes, hire a person — that is not a job for automation, and the bot should be handing those to somebody anyway.
Where we do this
If you are reading this from Cape Town, Ekurhuleni and Rustenburg, those pages go through the local version of it: which languages the bot needs, what the busy hours look like, and which sectors ask what.