Chat, patterns and email
Spot what keeps going wrong, talk to the shoppers who are hesitating, and follow up with the ones who ask you to.
1. Read the Insights page
Patterns looks across many visitors. For example: “When shoppers compare Product 1 and Product 2, 80% pick Product 2” or “Most people who check the delivery page add nothing to the basket”. Each shows how many sessions and visitors it rests on, over how many days, and how much to trust it. Fewer than three different visitors is never reported. Each pattern suggests what to do, often a chat trigger or an email.
2. Switch on the chat
In the Chat tab, tick the box and set the assistant's name, your shop name and colour. Choose when it may open: lingering on a product, comparing products, a full basket sitting idle, or about to leave on desktop. It never opens on the payment step, and not again after a visitor closes it (you choose the number of days).
- It only opens for visitors who accepted analytics through your cookie banner, so connect the banner first.
- It opens at most once per session, with a limit on how many replies one visitor or one site can use in a day.
- The first message names the products the visitor actually looked at, taken from their journey on your site, and says it is an automated assistant.
- Replies compare the chosen product with the others using your own pages: price, review score, stock and listed features. It never claims anything your pages do not say.
3. Set an offer you can honour
You may give the assistant one offer, for example “10% off your first order” with a code. It is quoted exactly as written, and only when the visitor asks or is leaving with a full basket. Create the discount code in your own shop yourself; Unagi cannot do it. The assistant cannot invent a different discount, a deadline or a stock level, and any reply that tries is thrown away.
Teach it about your shop
There is nothing to train. Unagi reads your product and policy pages itself (names, prices, descriptions, ratings, features, stock, delivery and returns), and the assistant may only use those facts. If your pages don't say something, such as gift wrapping, sizing advice or how repairs work, add it to What the assistant should know about your shop in Settings → Chat assistant, one item per paragraph. The Questions it could not answer list shows what shoppers asked that it couldn't, so you know what to add. Products described only by images or loaded entirely by scripts may be thin, so check them in the Pages & products tab.
Nearest branch, phone numbers, location and IP
In Settings, Data you collect lets you choose:
- Location: off, approximate (city or country, if your host reports it, for example Cloudflare's visitor location headers), or precise (shoppers can share their location; the browser or phone asks first; kept to about a kilometre).
- Branches: one per line as
Name | Address | latitude | longitude | offer | phone. The assistant answers "where is your nearest store?" with the closest branch, its distance and its offer, quoted as you wrote it, without calling the AI. - IP address: do not keep it (default), shortened, hashed, or full.
- Phone number: the chat can ask for a mobile number with its own unticked box and wording. Unagi stores it and shows it to you; sending texts needs your own SMS service.
Every consent given or withdrawn is logged with the wording the person saw, and appears on the customer's page. You are responsible for telling your visitors what you collect.
Keeping it on topic and keeping the cost down
The assistant only answers questions about your shop. Requests to write code, hack, do homework, write poems or discuss unrelated subjects are turned away by a rule before any AI is called, so they cost nothing, and a conversation that keeps trying is closed after three attempts. Each model call is small: a short history, a 300-character limit on what the visitor types, and a low ceiling on the length of the reply. There are limits per conversation, per visitor per day and per site per day, plus a monthly AI budget you set; when it is used up the assistant answers from rules instead.
4. Add an AI key, if you want natural conversation
By default replies come from rules using your pages. If the server has an Anthropic API key, conversations become more natural, under the same limits. Each conversation has a cost to the server's owner. Settings are on the server: ANTHROPIC_API_KEY, and optionally UNAGI_LLM_MODEL to choose a cheaper model.
5. Email follow-up
In Settings → Email, enter your sender name, a reply-to address and your postal address, which appears in every email. Then the chat can offer to email the visitor. They must type their address and tick an unticked box; the wording they saw is saved with their consent.
- Welcome email: sent once, straight away.
- Basket reminders: the first after the delay you choose (at least 60 minutes), a second after the follow-up time. Never more than two, and never after the person has bought; this is checked again just before sending.
- Promotions: to everyone who agreed or to those with something in their basket, only after you confirm the offer is real. Limited to three sends an hour.
- One marketing email per person per day. Every email has a one-click unsubscribe, and unsubscribing is final.
- You can erase any lead at any time, and export the list as CSV.
Email needs a delivery provider on the server (UNAGI_EMAIL_PROVIDER, UNAGI_EMAIL_API_KEY, UNAGI_EMAIL_FROM). Until then the dashboard says it is in test mode and nothing is sent.
Your own people: watch, take over, hand back
Switch on Let shoppers talk to a person in Settings → Chat assistant. A shopper can then ask for a person in their own words, or press the Talk to a person button. Your team gets an alert by email and, if you set one, a webhook (for Slack, Zendesk or your own systems) with the conversation so far, what the shopper looked at, their basket, their device and region.
- Add team members in Account. Each gets their own sign-in and sees only the Live chats tab, not your reports, customer emails or settings.
- Watch any chat live, including ones the assistant is handling, with the shopper's journey beside it.
- Take over at any time. The assistant goes quiet and spends nothing while a person is in charge. Only one person can hold a chat; an owner or agent can override.
- Hand back and the assistant carries on. The shopper sees a name or "Team", never an email address.
- If nobody is online when a shopper asks, they are told so and offered the email form, and the chat shows in your list as Asked for a person.
Shoppers are told when a person has joined, and the chat footer changes to say so. Conversations are kept for the same period as other visitor data.
6. See each customer's whole story
The Customers tab shows every consented visitor as a bubble, grouped by region, with their device and visit history. When someone gives their email in the chat, Unagi joins all of that browser's earlier and later visits to them, and a second device that uses the same email is joined too. The box the visitor ticks says their email will be linked to their visits on this device, so keep that wording, or something at least as clear, if you edit it.
7. Check it is working
By default 10% of eligible visitors never see the chat. Conversations → Results and history compares them with the visitors who did: sessions, additions to basket, purchases and purchase rate. It says “too early to call” until each group has at least 30 sessions. The “bought within 7 days of an email” figure on the Leads tab is an upper bound, because those people may have bought anyway.
Your responsibilities
You are the controller of your visitors' data. Mention the chat and email in your privacy notice, only send marketing to people who agreed, and keep promotions truthful. See the privacy policy, data processing addendum and terms. We are not a law firm: have your own advice on the rules that apply where you sell.