Catalog — products and contacts

The knowledge base teaches Wilow the facts about your business. The catalog teaches Wilow the things — discrete items the bot can recommend, link to, or hand off to. Two flavors: products (anything you sell or offer) and contacts (people the bot can route a visitor to).

When to use catalog vs knowledge

Knowledge snippets and document chunks are retrieved — Wilow pulls relevant pieces and grounds an answer on them. Good for explanations.

Catalog entries are rendered — when Wilow decides a product/contact answers the question, the widget shows a card with the title, image, price, and a click-through. Good for "I need this thing" answers.

Rule of thumb:

  • "What's your refund policy?" → knowledge.
  • "Which laptop do you recommend for video editing?" → catalog (products).
  • "Who do I talk to about partnership?" → catalog (contacts).

You don't have to choose. Most accounts have both; Wilow picks the appropriate output shape per turn.

Products

Admin → Catalog → Products → ⊕ New product. Fields:

  • Title — what the visitor sees as the headline of the card.
  • Description — short prose, 1–3 sentences. Don't paste your full marketing page; the card has limited room.
  • Image URL — recommend a square 400×400+. We don't host these; link to your CDN. Empty = no image, just text.
  • Variants — JSON-ish list of sub-options. Each variant has a name, price, SKU, image, active flag. Use this for size/color/tier. If your product has no variants, add one with name "Default" — Wilow needs at least one to render a card.
  • Active — flip off to hide from retrieval without deleting.

The card the bot renders includes the title, description, the matching variant (Wilow picks which based on the conversation), and a click-through. The link target is whatever you set on the product entry — your store page is the typical choice.

Wilow can also reference a product in plain prose without rendering a card — it'll do whatever fits the question better. You don't configure that, the model decides per turn.

Don't make every page a product

Tempting to upload your entire 500-SKU catalog. Don't, unless visitors actually shop by name. The bot performs better with 20–50 well-described representative products than with 500 thinly-described ones. If your catalog is huge, lean on the website crawl for product pages (so the bot can describe the product) and use the catalog only for the items you actively want to recommend in chat.

Contacts

Admin → Catalog → Contacts → ⊕ New contact. Fields:

  • Name + Role — "Maria Schmidt", "Head of Partnerships".
  • Email — the bot exposes this so the visitor can reach out directly. Visible to all visitors; don't list a personal email you don't want public.
  • Phone — optional, same caveat as email.
  • Specialties — short list, free-text. The bot routes by these. "partnerships, strategic accounts, Germany" tells Wilow this is the right contact when a visitor asks about partnership in DE.
  • Image URL — optional headshot. Same hosting note as products: we don't host, link to your CDN.
  • Active — flip off without deleting.

Cards render with name + role + the channels you set as click-throughs: email becomes a mailto: link, phone becomes a tel: link, and the URL (if you set one) becomes a "Profile" link to wherever you point it. If you set all three, all three surface.

Contacts work with the handoff flow, not as a replacement. Handoff routes a conversation to one operator email regardless of who the visitor was asking for. Contacts let the bot say "you'd want to talk to Maria — here's her email and what she covers" before any handoff is needed.

Pitfalls

  • Stale prices in cards. If your store changes prices and your catalog entries don't, visitors see the wrong number. We don't auto-sync prices from your store — link to the store page instead of putting a price on the variant if you can't keep them in sync.
  • No image on the card looks bad. Card layout assumes there's an image. If you didn't supply one, the card still renders but feels half-empty. Either always supply or always omit.
  • Active vs deleted. Deleting is permanent. If you're seasonally rotating things, deactivate.
  • Variant SKUs are internal to you. Visitors don't see them. The bot can use them for tracking if you write that into your store URL pattern; otherwise they're for your records.