Sell.AI Chatbot for WooCommerce

Changelog

1.5.0

• No locked features in the free plugin any more: every setting you see works. Pro features are only mentioned in short “Upgrade to Pro” banners, which disappear once Sell.AI Pro is installed.
• Response tone (formal / friendly / casual), response length and sales mode (passive / active / aggressive) are now regular free settings (Settings → Advanced → AI Prompt).
• Fixed: saving one Settings tab could clear settings of another tab (for example the sales mode) and cause PHP notices. Settings missing from a saved form now keep their value, and values damaged by 1.4.6 are repaired automatically.
• Fixed: saving the API tab of the settings switched the chatbot off (Chatbot status → Offline). Saving it now leaves the on/off status unchanged.
• The setup wizard and the “Upgrade to Pro” banners now describe only what each version really does: the free plugin uses fast keyword search (with SKUs, categories and synonyms); semantic AI search, AI keyword enrichment, email reports and A/B testing are Sell.AI Pro features.
• Changed: choosing an AI persona or an industry template is now a Sell.AI Pro feature. A persona or industry template you already saved (for example in the setup wizard) keeps working exactly as before — nothing changes on your store. The setup wizard now asks for your store information (what you sell, shipping, returns) instead.
• The chat widget can show tap-to-answer reply buttons under an answer (used by Sell.AI Pro’s guided selling; customers can always type instead).
• Fixed: while an answer was streamed, fragments of hidden control tags could briefly appear in the chat bubble.
• Statistics: clicks on recommended products and every product search (including searches with no results) are recorded in your own database (the figures are shown in Sell.AI Pro’s analytics dashboard). Recording is limited per chat session and IP address and covers only products visitors can see.
• Chat-assisted orders: an order placed within 7 days after a chat in the same browser gets the chat session ID as order meta (_sellai_session), and the revenue is counted only while the order is paid or on hold, minus refunds. Privacy: this uses the existing first-party sellai_session cookie (a random ID, 7 days; longer only if you set a longer window), and no name, email or message text is added to the order. Change the window, or set it to 0 to turn this off, with the sellai_attribution_window_days filter. The suggested privacy policy text (Settings → Privacy) now describes the click, search and order recording.
• Privacy: the WordPress personal data export and erase tools (Tools → Export / Erase Personal Data) now also cover the customer’s chatbot searches, product clicks and chat-assisted orders. They also find the chat sessions of the customer’s WooCommerce orders (by billing email and customer account), export the chat session stored on each order and remove it on erasure; WooCommerce’s own order eraser removes it as well.
• The suggested privacy policy text now states that search terms and product view, click and cart events are kept with the chat session ID for 365 days for statistics (also with conversation logging off), and shows the retention periods you set for chat messages, email leads and conversation history (0 = kept until deleted).
• Fixed: saving Settings → Advanced switched off settings that tab does not show (upsell and cross-sell suggestions, the wishlist button and search debug mode). Each tab now only changes the checkboxes it shows.
• Settings → Advanced shows the persona or industry template saved by an earlier version that the assistant still applies, with a “Use the neutral default” button.
• Safer database updates: new columns and indexes are added once, in the background (WP-Cron) or when an administrator opens wp-admin, with one change per table and never while a visitor loads a page. Until then the chatbot works as before.
• Fixed: an order could be counted twice as chat-assisted when the thank-you page and the payment confirmation arrived at the same time.
• Chat-assisted orders: renewal, resubscribe and switch orders of WooCommerce Subscriptions are not counted, an order counts only when it was placed within the attribution window after the chat, and the chat session is not copied to subscriptions and renewals.
• Product view statistics no longer write to the options table on every page view; repeated events are ignored before any counter is updated.
• PHP 8.4 compatibility: no deprecation notice when exporting leads or conversions as CSV.
• Security: only administrators can set, replace or remove the OpenAI API key (Settings → API and the setup wizard). Shop Managers see the masked key and can use the rest of the tab.
• Uninstall (with “Delete all data”) now also removes scheduled events that carry arguments, such as Sell.AI Pro’s email reports.
• For developers: new filters sellai_system_prompt, sellai_system_prompt_sections, sellai_product_card_limit, sellai_attribution_window_days, sellai_revenue_order_statuses, sellai_quick_replies_enabled, sellai_quick_replies, sellai_stage_detection_enabled, sellai_settings_tabs and sellai_data_tabs, plus actions sellai_settings_render_tab, sellai_data_render_tab and sellai_stage_detected (see includes/pro-bridge/class-sellai-hook-extension-points.php).
• If you use Sell.AI Chatbot Pro, update it to 5.0.0 to get its new features (analytics, A/B testing, email reports and more).

1.4.6

• Fixed: a script error stopped part of the chat widget from running — the conversation history for logged-in customers, Pro Smart Triggers, the full-page quick buttons and variation sync now work.
• Fixed: conversation summaries failed with GPT-5 models; failed summaries are no longer retried every hour.
• Fixed: “Hide on pages” accepts page IDs as well as URLs; the settings show the real shortcode [sellai_chatbot]; all 12 industry templates from the setup wizard now apply; FAQ auto-replies no longer show an empty bubble; “Test API” checks the key you typed; “proactive” lead capture now offers the form after the first answer.
• Security: new installs get rate limits (50 messages per session, 120 per IP per hour) and a site-wide daily request limit (1000) that protects your OpenAI budget. Existing installs keep their current settings — nothing changes by itself; a notice on the plugin screens recommends the new limits. Messages are capped at 1000 characters, history sent to OpenAI is capped, and the global on/off switch now stops all chat requests. When the daily limit pauses the chat, the admin sees a notice.
• Sites behind Cloudflare, a load balancer or another proxy can pass the real visitor IP to the per-IP limit with the sellai_client_ip filter.
• Security: draft, private, hidden and password-protected products can no longer be shown or added to the cart through the chat.
• Security: hardened link formatting in chat replies, lead submissions (throttled, never overwrite existing leads, consent required), session cookies, CSV exports and API error handling — visitors never see raw API errors; the admin sees them as a notice.
• The API key is no longer printed into the settings page; admin pages and actions consistently require the manage_woocommerce capability.
• Privacy: retention periods for leads and conversation history (new installs: 365 / 180 days; existing installs: 0 = keep forever until you set a period, so no data is deleted by the update), personal data export/erase tools, privacy policy text, no customer queries in debug.log.
• Purchases attributed to the chat are now recorded server-side only (HPOS compatible).
• The Pro feature list in this readme now lists only features available today.

1.4.5

• Fixed: the chatbot and the “Test API connection” check failed with GPT-5 models (which are now the default), showing errors such as “✗ Error: [object Object]” when saving the API key. GPT-5 / o-series models use the Chat Completions API differently — they require max_completion_tokens instead of max_tokens and do not accept a custom temperature — so every request was rejected with an HTTP 400. Requests are now built correctly for these models (with minimal reasoning effort for fast, low-cost replies), while GPT-4-era models keep working as before.
• Fixed: API-error messages returned by the server are now displayed in full on the Settings and Setup Wizard screens instead of the placeholder “[object Object]”.

1.4.4

• Updated the AI model options to OpenAI’s current GPT-5 family. New default is GPT-5, with GPT-5 Mini as the fast/economical option; the old GPT-4o / GPT-4 Turbo / GPT-3.5 choices were retired from the pickers. Existing configurations keep working. Refreshed the API cost estimates to GPT-5 pricing.

1.4.3

• Compatibility: tested with WordPress 7.1.

1.4.2

• Added a SellAI_Knowledge_Base::count_synonym_pairs_by_source() helper so Pro can report how many synonym pairs it has generated, distinct from manually-entered ones.
• Supports Sell.AI Pro’s new “AI Synonym Auto-generate” feature (see Pro changelog), which now writes its suggestions into the same Synonym manager table shown in Search & AI → Synonyms.

1.4.1

• Fixed incomplete admin-panel translations: several strings introduced in recent releases (Search & AI page, product-keyword meta box, setup wizard, settings) were missing from the Polish, German, French, Spanish and Italian language files and always rendered in English regardless of the selected admin panel language. All are now translated.
• Sell.AI Pro’s admin UI (tab labels, License/RAG/AI Enrichment screens) previously had no translation files at all and always rendered in English. It now reads its labels through the free plugin’s language system, so it follows the same admin panel language setting.
• Fixed a stale menu reference in the product-keyword meta box hint pointing at the old “AI / Embeddings” page name.

1.4.0

• Admin menu reorganized: “Data” renamed to “Analytics” (translated across all supported languages). System now only covers Diagnostics (plus a License tab when Pro is active). Search index, Synonyms, and Pro’s Semantic Search (RAG) / AI Enrichment are consolidated into one new “Search & AI” page.

1.3.2

• Fixed the Synonym manager (System → Tools) — “Load synonym list” always returned an empty list and saving always failed, because the manual synonym storage class was referenced but never implemented. Implemented it, so admin-defined synonym pairs now save, load and power search as intended.
• Added a “Sell.AI Search Keywords” meta box on the WooCommerce product edit screen to view and manually edit each product’s search keywords (the same field used by keyword search/ranking and by Pro’s AI Enrichment tool).

1.3.1

• Admin panel redesign: native WordPress-style look (nav-tab navigation, metabox-style cards, standard buttons) while keeping the Sell.AI brand accent. Rarely-used settings are now tucked into collapsible sections so the Settings page is less overwhelming at a glance. Fixed two pre-existing CSS bugs (dashboard stat colour, danger-button colour) and an invalid inline style on the Data removal card.

1.3.0

• Added developer extension points (hooks and filters) so the Sell.AI Chatbot Pro add-on can extend the plugin without conflicts. No change to behaviour when the add-on is not installed.

1.2.3

• Security: the per-session message rate-limit transient key is now hashed, so a user-controlled session cookie can no longer be used to create arbitrary plugin-prefixed transient names.

1.0.2

• Setup wizard: step-by-step OpenAI API key guide with direct link and cost transparency
• Setup wizard: pre-filled suggested questions so chatbot looks good out of the box
• Setup wizard: “See chatbot on your store” button on the Done screen
• Setup wizard: welcome screen features corrected to free-only capabilities

1.0.1

• Free version: 200 messages/month limit with dashboard usage indicator
• Dashboard: monthly usage bar showing messages used, remaining, and upgrade prompt

1.0.0

• Initial release on WordPress.org