Chat Assistant
Overview
The Chat Assistant is a floating Q&A popup that lives on every page inside the Alfo admin. It’s a patient e-commerce consultant that knows your plan, knows what features you have enabled, and can walk you through how to use them. It’s free on every plan, with per-tier rate limits that prevent runaway usage.
The popup has two tabs:
- Chat — Streaming AI Q&A for questions about discounts, conditions, bundles, upsells, validation, and the app itself.
- Support — A form for sending a message directly to the Alfo support team by email.
Plan requirement: Free on all plans (Starter, Pro, Enterprise). Rate limits vary by tier (see below).
What You Can Ask
The assistant is tuned for questions merchants actually ask. Some examples:
- “How do I create a discount for VIP customers over $100?”
- “What conditions are available on the Starter plan?”
- “Explain my current VIP discount rule — what does it actually do?”
- “What’s the difference between the ‘first’ and ‘all’ strategies?”
- “How do I set up a bundle?”
- “Why didn’t my discount apply to this test order?”
The assistant is plan-aware: it knows which discount types, conditions, and features your tier includes, so it won’t recommend an Enterprise-only feature to a Starter-plan merchant.
Read-Only Design
Important: The assistant never writes to Shopify, never modifies your discounts, and never calls the Shopify Admin API on your behalf. It reads your current configuration to give grounded answers and, where useful, drafts a prompt you can send to the discount AI Assistant yourself.
This design keeps the assistant predictable and safe. You’re always the one who applies changes — the chat just helps you figure out what to do.
Suggested Prompts
When the assistant describes a discount it thinks you’d like to create, it may offer a “Create this discount” suggested-prompt card in its response. Clicking the card does one of two things:
- On a discount editor page: the prompt is sent straight into the AI Assistant composer on that page, so you can generate, refine, and apply it without leaving the editor.
- Anywhere else in the app: the prompt is copied to your clipboard and you’re deep-linked to the Discounts page, where you can create a new rule and paste the prompt into the AI Assistant.
The suggested-prompt card is dropped automatically if it would suggest a discount type that isn’t included in your plan, so you won’t get an Enterprise-only suggestion on a Starter account.
Privacy
Important: Your chat history is stored only in your browser. Alfo does not keep a server-side copy. Every request sends your latest messages to our AI provider for a response, and nothing about the conversation is retained on our infrastructure afterward.
Clearing the chat history from the popup removes it from your browser. Our customers/redact and shop/redact webhooks are no-ops for chat specifically, because there’s nothing stored to redact.
If you use Alfo across multiple browsers or devices, each one maintains its own independent chat history.
Rate Limits
Rate limits are per-shop and applied in fixed windows (not rolling). They reset at the top of each hour and at midnight UTC respectively.
| Tier | Hourly | Daily |
|---|---|---|
| Starter | 30 | 150 |
| Pro | 80 | 500 |
| Enterprise | 150 | 1,500 |
If you hit a limit, the chat surfaces a clear message telling you when to try again. There’s no credit deduction — chat is free on every plan.
Support Tab
The Support tab is a direct line to the Alfo team. It mirrors the Support form from the app’s Settings page so you don’t need to leave the page you’re on to file a question.
Fields:
- Subject — Short summary of your request.
- Email — The address you want the reply sent to.
- Request type — Category (question, bug, feature request, billing, other).
- Message — The full body of your request.
Submissions are sent via email. Replies land directly in your inbox at the email address you provide — check your “Sent” folder if you want to see the copy that went out.
Next Steps
- AI Assistant — The credit-based AI that generates, updates, refines, and explains discount configurations.
- FAQ — Common questions answered in written form.
- Troubleshooting — Diagnose specific discount behavior issues.