An AI shopping assistant for WooCommerce that stores no conversations: what it can answer, what it cannot, and a 10-minute setup

Notes An AI shopping assistant for WooCommerce that stores no conversations: what it can answer, what it cannot, and a 10-minute setup Andrej Lauko, ARLing · 6 September 2026 Most chat widgets a WooCommerce store adds today keep a full transcript of what a shopper typed and how the widget answered, sitting in the vendor's database for as long as its retention policy allows. ARLing Asistent, a WordPress plugin for WooCommerce, is built the other way: it answers shopping questions from a store's own product feed and keeps no record of the conversation itself, only a daily count. This note covers why that difference matters, how a feed-grounded assistant actually works, what it answers well and where it stops, the setup, the pricing, and how it compares on price and data handling to Tidio's Lyro and Smartsupp's Mira. 01 Why most chat widgets store every conversation A chat widget that keeps transcripts makes the store a data controller for that content under GDPR: the store decides why the data is collected and how long it is kept, even though the vendor's server does the actual storing. That controller role brings duties many small stores never plan for: a lawful basis for keeping the transcript, a retention period that has to be justified if asked, a way to answer a shopper's access or deletion request within a month, and a data processing agreement with the vendor spelling out what it may do with the content. None of that is hard on its own, but it is another document to keep, another request to route, and another place a customer's name or order number can leak if the vendor has a breach. There is a smaller, everyday reason too: support load. A widget that saves every conversation eventually invites someone to go looking through it, whether to audit what the bot said or to answer "what did it tell this customer." A widget that keeps nothing beyond a daily count removes that job along with the risk. 02 How a feed-grounded assistant works ARLing Asistent connects to