Storefront chat

A floating chat widget sits in the bottom-right of every storefront page. It's the casual entry point — quick questions, recommendations, help finding something.

What it can do

• Answer product questions. "Do you have anything in linen under €70?" The assistant runs a catalog search and returns up to a handful of matches with a short summary.
• Look up your orders (signed-in shoppers). "Where's my last order?" It pulls the order from your history and reads back status + tracking.
• Speak your language. It detects your locale (the URL prefix) and replies in English or Dutch.
• Stay on topic. The persona is configured by the store — see Customize — so it sounds like this shop, not a generic chatbot.

What it does not do

• It does not modify your cart or your orders. For that, use the Shopping agent.
• It does not have admin tools. Anything that would mutate the catalog or someone else's data is unreachable.

Where chat history lives

• Signed in — your conversations are stored under your account at /chat_threads/{threadId}. You can come back to a thread later.
• Anonymous — your conversations live in your browser's localStorage, signed with an HMAC key that's scoped to the thread. This prevents tampering and means we don't need a server-side anonymous account.
• If you sign in later, the platform can adopt your anonymous history into your account (with your consent) so you don't lose context.

Implementation

Under the hood the chat is a Genkit flow (src/genkit/chat-flow.ts) calling Vertex Gemini 2.0 Flash in europe-west4. The flow has a small toolset (product search, order lookup) and a persona injected from the tenant settings.

If the platform isn't configured with Vertex credentials (development environments), the chat returns a friendly "not configured" reply instead of throwing — so you don't see a broken widget.