A WordPress chat plugin that answers from your policies and acts in WooCommerce
A WordPress chat plugin is only as good as what's behind the bubble. Hay.chat's free plugin puts an AI agent on your site that has read your pages, opens the customer's WooCommerce order, and refunds it when your policy says yes.
Most WordPress chat plugins stop at the answer
Install almost any chat plugin from the WordPress directory and you get a bubble in the corner. Some put a person behind it. The newer ones put an AI behind it that has read your FAQ page. Either way, a customer asking "where's my order?" usually ends up with a tracking link, or a promise that someone will be in touch.
The answer they wanted lives in WooCommerce. It's in the order record, behind your admin login, and an FAQ bot can't read it. So the job lands back on you, often at the end of the day, copying an order number from the chat into wp-admin.
Hay.chat's plugin is the widget, and honestly the widget is the least interesting part. The agent behind it has read your site and follows playbooks you write in plain language. When someone asks about an order, it opens that order in your store and deals with it.
What the plugin does on your WordPress site
A chat widget that looks like yours
Pick the side of the screen, the theme colour, the title, the greeting, the agent's name and the logos from the plugin's settings page. One switch turns it off again.
Answers from your own pages
Import your site by URL and Hay.chat reads every page your sitemap lists. Add PDFs or Word files for anything that isn't published, like the returns rules you only ever explain over email.
Does the work in WooCommerce
Looks up orders and customers, checks stock, adds order notes, changes an order's status and creates refunds, all inside the limits you set in a playbook. Can't finish? It hands the chat to a person with the lookups done.
WordPress chat plugins compared: who can actually refund an order?
These are the plugins every roundup lists, and most of them now have an AI that answers from your content. What splits them is the WooCommerce column.
Swipe the table sideways to see every column.
| Plugin | Free plan | AI that answers from your content | Acts in WooCommerce (orders, refunds) | EU hosting | Entry paid plan |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hay.chat | No. The plugin is free; plans come with a 30-day free trial, no credit card | Yes, on every plan | Yes. Looks up orders, changes status and creates refunds, within your playbook rules | Yes, EU storage on every plan (AI replies by OpenAI in the US, under SCCs) | €50/month (Solo, 500 resolutions) |
| Tidio | Yes. 50 human-handled conversations a month, 10 operators; Lyro's first 50 AI conversations free, once | Yes, Lyro. Monthly AI conversations are a paid add-on | Agents see carts and order history. No WooCommerce action for the AI stated | Yes, data stored in the EEA | $29/month billed monthly, $24.17 billed annually (Starter) |
| LiveChat | No. 14-day free trial | Yes. 10 AI resolutions a month on Essential, 200 on Growth | AI and agents see the cart and order history. No order or refund action stated | Yes, choose EU or US storage | $25 per user/month billed monthly, $19 billed annually (Essential) |
| tawk.to | Yes, free forever. Removing the branding costs $29/month | Yes, AI Assist add-on, with a free tier for low volume | Not stated | No, data stored in the US | AI Assist from $29/month |
| Crisp | Yes. 2 seats, no AI | Yes. AI agent from Mini; training on your content and AI answers from Essentials | Agents see orders and can refund from the inbox. No AI action stated | Yes, EU-hosted on every plan | $45/month per workspace, 4 seats (Mini) |
| HubSpot | Yes. 2 users, live chat with HubSpot branding, a limited bot | Yes, Customer Agent, on Professional and Enterprise only | Not stated | Yes, EU (Germany) data centre | $20 per seat/month billed monthly (Service Hub Starter) |
| Olark | No. 14-day free trial | Yes, AI agent at $400/month billed annually | Not stated | No, data stored in the US | $29 per agent/month (live chat, no AI) |
| JivoChat | Yes, for small teams (the page gives the agent limit as both 5 and 2) | Yes, AI Agent at $69 per agent/month billed annually | Not stated | Not as a choice. Data may be stored in any region | $28 per agent/month billed annually (Basic) |
| 3CX Live Chat | Yes. Free plugin; 3CX is free for up to 10 users | Not stated for chat (its AI agent is documented for calls) | Not stated | Yes, if you pick the Europe region | $300/year (Basic licence) |
Competitor plans and prices as of 20 October 2026, each from the vendor's own pricing or product pages, in US dollars as shown there. "Not stated" means we couldn't find it on the vendor's pages. LiveChat now sells its plans under the name Text. Hay.chat prices are from our pricing page and change only with notice.
Watch it handle your own orders. 30 days free, no credit card.
Start Your Free TrialHow to install the Hay.chat WordPress plugin
Get the plugin on wordpress.org. It needs WordPress 6.4 or later and PHP 7.4 or later. It's tested up to WordPress 7.1.3.
- Add the plugin. In wp-admin, go to Plugins, then Add New, and search for "Hay.chat". Or download the zip from wordpress.org and upload the
haychatfolder to/wp-content/plugins/. - Activate it from the Plugins menu.
- Connect your account. Open the Hay.chat menu in the admin sidebar and click "Connect with Hay.chat". It sends you to your dashboard to pick an organisation and brings the ID back. You can also paste the Organization ID by hand from Settings, then API Tokens, in Hay.chat.
- Save. The chat widget appears on your site straight away.
That gives you the widget. Two more steps make it useful:
- Teach it your site. In Hay.chat, go to Documents, then Import Document, and paste your site's URL. It follows your sitemap and imports each page as its own document.
- Connect WooCommerce. In WooCommerce, go to Settings, Advanced, REST API, and add a key with Read/Write permissions. Paste the consumer key and secret into the WooCommerce integration in Hay.chat. Hay.chat tests the connection when you save.
Built for WooCommerce, and the tools around it
113 WooCommerce actions for orders, refunds, products, customers and coupons. Plus Stripe for payments and Zendesk for tickets.
Where your chat data goes
The plugin stores nothing on your WordPress server except its own settings, and it sends nothing from your server to Hay.chat. On pages where the widget is switched on, the visitor's browser loads the widget from eu.hay.chat, and messages typed into it go there so the agent can reply. Uninstall the plugin and its settings are deleted from your database.
Conversation data, customer records and message logs are stored in the EU, on every plan. The AI replies are generated by OpenAI in the US, under EU Standard Contractual Clauses, so the message text goes there to produce each reply. Conversations are kept until you delete them or set a retention period in your workspace settings. The sub-processor list names every provider and where it processes data.
Hay.chat is also source-available. The plugin works with a self-hosted install too: change the API Base URL in its settings and the widget loads from your own server instead.
What it doesn't do
- It isn't a chat system on its own. The plugin connects your site to a Hay.chat account. Conversations, playbooks and settings live in the Hay.chat dashboard, not in wp-admin.
- The plugin doesn't connect WooCommerce by itself. Order lookups and refunds come from the WooCommerce integration, which you set up once with a REST API key. Skip it and you have a chat widget that answers from your content and nothing more.
- There are no file uploads or proactive messages yet. Visitors can't attach a photo in the widget, and it won't open a chat based on the page or time on site. Both are planned. Read receipts too.
- It won't go past your rules. If a playbook says refunds over a set amount go to a person, they go to a person. You can also keep refunds switched off and run it on lookups only.
Stop copying order numbers from the chat into wp-admin
Install the plugin, import your site, connect WooCommerce. Then let Hay.chat close the order questions you used to forward to yourself.
- 30-day free trial
- No credit card required
- Set up in under 10 minutes
- Hosted in Europe