Product sync and product notes

How your catalog gets in

The Storebird plugin syncs your WooCommerce products to your Storebird account: names, prices, descriptions, images, variations and stock.

Syncing happens:

• On first connection — your whole catalog is imported
• When you create or update a product in WooCommerce
• On demand — trigger a sync from the plugin settings in WordPress

A large catalog takes a few minutes on first import. After that, updates are incremental.

Why this matters

This is the difference between an AI that reads a FAQ you wrote and an AI that knows your shop. Because the catalog is live, your AI can answer "is that available in medium", "what does it cost with the discount", and "what do you have under €50 in blue" — and be right at the moment it answers.

If your products are missing or stale, everything downstream suffers. Check the connection first when answers go wrong: Plugin Connection.

Product notes

Product descriptions are written for browsing customers. They rarely contain the things people actually ask before buying — fit, compatibility, what is in the box, which model it replaces.

Product notes let you attach that knowledge to a specific product. The AI treats a note as authoritative for that product.

Good notes are the ones you find yourself repeating in email:

• "Runs one size small — order up if you are between sizes"
• "Fits the 2021 model onwards, not the 2019"
• "Ships in two boxes; the stand arrives separately"
• "This replaced the older X200 — same mount, brighter lamp"

Find the product on the Product notes page, add the note, save. It applies from the next question onward.

Things the AI will not do with your catalog

• It does not change prices, stock or product data. The sync is one-way, from WooCommerce to Storebird.
• It does not invent products. If a customer asks for something you do not sell, the correct answer is to say so — and, where sensible, point at the closest thing you do sell.
• It does not show out-of-stock items as available. Stock comes from the same sync as the price.
• It does not offer a variation you never created. See below.

Variations: only what really exists

A variable product in WooCommerce has two different lists, and they are easy to confuse:

1. The attribute terms — every value that exists in your shop for that attribute. If you use one global "Colour" attribute, this is the full colour list of your whole shop, not of this product.
2. The variations — the combinations you actually created and can sell, each with its own stock.

Storebird answers from the second list only. If your sheet exists in blue, red, black, white and orange, your customer is told those five and their stock — even when the colour attribute itself lists seventeen values. A colour without a variation is never offered, and a sold-out variation is named as sold out.

What to check when a customer says an option is missing: open the Variations tab of that product in WooCommerce, not the attribute list. If the variation is not there, the AI will — correctly — say the shop does not have it.

Duplicate variations. If the same option appears twice with different stock (this happens after an import), Storebird treats it as available. Remove the duplicate in WooCommerce if that is not what you want.

Backorder: does "on backorder" mean "not available"?

That depends on your shop, so this is a setting.

WooCommerce marks a product on backorder when it can still be ordered but is not on the shelf. For a shop that holds stock, that is a warning worth giving. For a shop that supplies to order, it is nothing more than a delivery term — and saying "not available right now" there costs you a sale you had already won.

Two settings, per store:

• Strict (default) — an on-backorder product is offered as orderable, but never as "in stock" or "available right now", and it is not used as an in-stock alternative. Nothing changes for you if you do nothing.
• Deliverable — an on-backorder product is treated as normally orderable. The AI confirms the customer can order it and may offer it as an alternative, exactly like an in-stock item. It still never claims the item is on the shelf today or ready for immediate pickup.

The AI never invents a delivery time. If you have not given us your lead-time sentence, it says the item can simply be ordered and points at the delivery time stated on your website. Give us that sentence and it uses your exact wording.

Out of stock is not affected. A product WooCommerce marks outofstock stays "not in stock" under both settings. If items you can actually supply sit on outofstock in WooCommerce, fix them there — Storebird answers with what your shop says.

To switch your store to deliverable, ask in the chat on storebird.ai. There is no self-serve toggle for this yet.

When a product answer is wrong

1. Check the product in WooCommerce — is the data actually right there?
2. Trigger a sync from the plugin settings and re-ask
3. Still wrong → add a product note with the correct fact
4. If the AI cannot find a product your customers ask for by another name, add a synonym group under Branding & Tone

See also Troubleshooting.