Can Hay.chat support a custom or headless store?

Hay.chat on a custom or headless store: answers from your imported site and docs, playbooks, business hours and hand-off, with no order actions.

What Hay.chat can do without a store plugin#

If your shop is custom-built or headless, Hay.chat still answers shoppers from the website pages and docs you import. It follows the playbooks you write, keeps to your business hours, and hands chats to your team when it should.

Web chat, the email inbox channel and Instagram DMs don't need a store plugin, so they work on a custom store too.

Business hours are live, so shoppers are told when your team is back. Hand-off works the same as on any other store: the chat goes to a person when the shopper asks for one, a tool fails and needs manual work, the AI's confidence is low, an answer fails its action-claim check, a playbook reaches a Handoff to human step, or an approval expires.

What it can't do#

Without a store plugin, Hay.chat can't look up, refund, cancel or change orders.

How to set it up#

Import your site and help docs under Documents → Import Document. Use Import from Website to crawl the site or a sitemap and pull in several pages at once.
Add the web chat widget under Settings → Webchat.
Set your business hours under Settings → Channels → Business Hours.

Then write a few playbooks for the questions you get most.

If your store runs on a supported platform#

Hay.chat has store plugins for Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento, Wix and Nuvemshop, with Stripe for payments. If your shop runs on one of these platforms, connect its plugin instead. Each page above covers what the AI can do there.