AskParla AI Shopping Assistant for WooCommerce
Parla adds a chat to your store that opens on a choice: talk, or type. It sells first and handles the rest of the order lifecycle after.
- Finds products in the shopper’s own words (“red sweater size M”), typos and other languages included
- Recommends one of them and says why, from your own product data – never an invented claim
- Adds the exact variant to the cart from inside the chat
- Hands-free voice calls, if you turn them on
- Tracks an order, once the shopper has proved it is theirs
- Changes a shipping address while the order can still be changed
- Starts a return inside your return window
- Hands over to your team when it cannot help, with a real ticket
It speaks eight languages, follows the shopper’s light or dark setting, and wears your brand colour.
Nothing is invented to make a sale: scarcity is only ever mentioned when your stock says so, and the assistant never offers a discount, because it has no way to make one.
External services
This plugin is the shop’s end of Parla, a hosted AI sales assistant. The assistant itself runs on Parla’s servers, not in your WordPress: without a Parla account and a shop key, the plugin does nothing. Installing it therefore means your shop talks to a third-party service, and this section sets out exactly what leaves your site and when.
Service: Parla, https://askparla.com
Terms of service: https://askparla.com/cgu
Privacy policy: https://askparla.com/confidentialite
What is sent, and when:
- On every page where the chat is enabled. The chat script is loaded from Parla’s servers, so the visitor’s IP address and browser user agent reach Parla as part of that request, as they would with any externally hosted script. The script tag also carries your shop id, your shop’s name, the type of page (product, category, cart, checkout, order), the product id and page title on a product page, and, only if you switch on “Greet customers by name”, the first name of a signed-in customer.
- When a shopper opens the chat and writes or speaks. What they type or say, a random conversation id, the page they are on, and their browser’s language. Nothing is sent if a visitor loads the page and never uses the chat, beyond the script request above.
- When a shopper asks about an order. The order number and the email address they type, so the order can be confirmed as theirs before anything is shown. Addresses are masked before the AI model sees them.
- When a shopper leaves an email to be told about a restock, or about something you do not sell. Their address passes through Parla and is written straight back into your own site, where you can read the list and remove anyone from it (WooCommerce → Parla → Reports). Parla keeps only the product or the phrase they are waiting on, never the address. The email, when the moment comes, is sent by your site from your own address.
- When you open WooCommerce → Parla in your admin. The page asks Parla for this shop’s figures and its saved settings, and the live preview loads the chat script so you can see your changes; that preview counts as one conversation against your plan, and it is seeded with your own first name from your WordPress profile so the greeting looks right. On the Voice tab, if your plan includes premium voice, your browser also asks Parla for the list of voices you may choose from and plays a sample clip from Parla’s servers when you press play on one.
- When you press “Connect store”. Your site address and your Parla settings, and the plugin creates a WooCommerce REST API key so Parla can read your catalogue and, when a shopper has proved an order is theirs, that order. Deleting the plugin removes that key.
Parla passes conversation text to Anthropic (Claude) to write the answers. When premium voice is switched on, the audio of a call also goes to Deepgram (speech recognition) and Cartesia (the voice). The privacy policy above lists every subprocessor and where each one processes data.
Privacy
To count the sales it helps with, the chat sets two first-party cookies on your site when a shopper uses it: parla_assist (a random conversation id, 7 days) and parla_added (the ids of products it put in the cart, 7 days). They hold nothing personal and are only read by this plugin, on your site, when an order is placed. Depending on your country and your consent setup, you may want to list them in your cookie policy.