AI Store Copilot - Sales, Inventory, Customers & Actions

Ask your store anything in plain English and get real answers — and safe, confirmed actions — right inside your CS-Cart admin

Description

The AI Store Copilot puts a chat window inside your CS-Cart admin panel (and vendor panel, if you turn that on). You type any question the way you’d ask a helpful employee, and the AI answers using your real store numbers.

No filters to click, no dropdowns to fill in, no jumping between reports just to find one number. You just ask:

• “What were my top 10 sellers last month?”
• “How many orders are still Processed and older than a week?”
• “Where are my customers coming from this year?”

…and you get a real answer in seconds, straight from your store’s live data. You can ask anything in plain English. The AI reads your question, decides what to look up, gets the numbers from your store, and writes a clean answer.

Behind the scenes, the AI works from a fixed list of safe, ready-made lookups (things like “get sales totals for this date range” or “list top products by revenue”). It uses your store’s own built-in reports to get the numbers, so every safety rule and access limit you already have stays exactly the same. If your question matches something the AI can look up, you get an answer. If it doesn’t, the AI either tells you what it can help with, or asks a quick follow-up question so it can help you better.

The Copilot can also do things for you: change prices in bulk, create discount coupons, mark old orders as Completed. But only after showing you a preview and getting your “yes, go ahead” first.

You decide if vendors get to use it. By default, only your admins have the Copilot. Tick the “Enable AI Copilot for vendors” checkbox in the addon settings and your vendors get their own Copilot too, limited to only their own products, orders, and customers.

Key Features

• Ask anything in plain English: no filters to click, no special commands to remember, no need to know how any of it works.
• Safe by design: the AI can only do things from a fixed list of ready-made lookups and actions. It never invents its own way to look at your data. It uses your store’s own built-in reports, so all your safety rules stay in place.
• Six AI services to choose from: Anthropic Claude, OpenAI, Google Gemini, Mistral AI, DeepSeek, and OpenRouter. Switch any time without reinstalling.
• You choose who can use it: the “Enable AI Copilot for vendors” checkbox turns vendor access on or off. Off by default, so only your admins have it until you decide to turn it on for vendors too.
• Chat history sidebar: every conversation is saved and grouped by when it happened (Today, Yesterday, Last 7 days, Last 30 days, Older). Pin the ones you use often. Delete the ones you don’t need anymore.
• Smart short titles: instead of “create report of 15 products those has orders…”, the sidebar shows a clean title like “Low stock products report”.
• Export any chat: download the whole conversation as a CSV file for your records.
• Read-only mode: one switch that blocks every action that would change your store. Perfect for junior staff, or for when you want the Copilot to only read your data, not change anything.
• Marketplace-safe: each vendor only sees their own products, orders, and customers. The limit is built right into the store’s own data queries, not just a rule for the AI to follow.
• Multi-storefront ready: if you run more than one storefront, you can filter answers to just one at a time.
• Monthly spending cap: set a dollar amount. Chat stops when it’s reached. Resets automatically on the 1st of each month.
• Cost warnings: get a notice in the admin panel when your monthly spend hits 80% and again at 90% of the cap.
• Daily limit per user: stops one busy admin from spending the whole day’s budget alone.
• Usage browser: filter every past chat by date, admin, vendor, AI service, action, or result. Great for checking costs and seeing who’s been using the Copilot for what.
• Full history log: every question, every action the AI ran, how long it took, and how much it cost.
• Stop button: cancel a slow-running question any time.
• See what happened: click any answer to see what the AI looked up, how much it found, and how long each step took.
• Nicely formatted answers: headings, bold text, bullet lists, tables, and code blocks. Long answers stay easy to read.
• Works in your language: the AI writes answers in your admin panel language.
• Privacy first: customer names, emails, and phone numbers are hidden by default. They only show up when you specifically ask for them.

Supported AI Providers

You need an account with at least one of these AI services. Sign up, generate an API key from your account page, paste it into the addon settings, and you’re ready to go. The AI service bills you directly for what you use, usually less than a cent per question.

How It Works

1. You pick an AI service in the addon settings and paste your API key from that service.
2. You open the AI Copilot from the admin sidebar and type any question in plain English.
3. The AI reads what you asked. It picks the right lookups from its safe list, runs them against your live store data, and writes back a plain-English answer with real numbers.
4. Every question and answer is saved to the sidebar so you can go back to old chats any time.
5. The AI service bills you directly (pay-as-you-go). The addon shows you a monthly cap so you never get a surprise bill.
6. If your question isn’t something the AI can look up (like the weather, or general web questions), it politely tells you what it CAN help with. If your question is close but is missing something (like “show me sales” without saying which dates), it asks you a quick follow-up.
7. A typical question costs a fraction of a cent. A complex one that needs several lookups can cost up to about ten cents.

What You Can Ask

Ask any question you’d ask a smart helper who knows your store. The examples below are just to give you ideas.

Sales, Money, and Revenue

“How’s this month vs last month?” · “Top products this quarter?” · “Revenue by category last 90 days?” · “How much tax did I collect by state last quarter?” · “Where are sales coming from, top countries?”

Customers

“Show me my 5 newest customers with names, emails, phones, and addresses” · “Top spenders this quarter?” · “Are new customers coming back to order again?” · “What’s the average customer lifetime value by signup year?”

Inventory and Products

“What’s running low?” · “What should I reorder now?” · “When will SKU JE-529 run out at the current sales speed?” · “How has product DG-4348 been selling?” · “Which size and color of my Winter Jacket sells the most?” · “What do people usually buy together with product Y?”

Orders and Shipping

“Show me my last 10 orders” · “How are my orders split by status this month?” · “How fast are we shipping, broken down by vendor?” · “What abandoned carts do I have this week and how much are they worth?” · “Which discounts were actually used last month?”

Returns and Refunds (needs the built-in RMA addon)

“What’s my refund rate this quarter?” · “Which products come back the most?” · “Top reasons customers return things?”

Payments and Shipping Methods

“Which payment methods are customers using the most?” · “Revenue by shipping method?” · “How’s the discount use looking?”

Multi-Vendor Stores

“How much do I owe each vendor right now?” · “Cross-vendor sales summary” · “Per-vendor performance”

Search Insights

“What are customers searching for the most?”

Build CS-Cart Sales Reports by Conversation

Describe the report you want in plain English, and the Copilot builds a preview for you:

“Give me a report of revenue by category for Q1, only Completed orders, grouped by month.”

You see the actual data first. If it looks right, say “save it” and the Copilot saves it as a normal CS-Cart Sales Report. You can then re-open and re-run it from the standard Reports page any time. The Copilot can also list your saved reports, run them with a different date range, update them, or delete them, all with confirmation.

Take Actions on Your Store (With Your Confirmation)

The Copilot can also make changes to your store. But nothing ever changes right away. It always shows you what it’s about to do first, waits for you to say “yes, go ahead”, and only then makes the change.

• Bulk price adjust: “Raise all prices in Category 12 by 5%” or “Set these SKUs to $19.99”
• Bulk stock adjust: “Set stock to 0 for these SKUs” or “Add 10 units to every product in Category X”
• Mark orders complete: “Mark order #38 as Completed” · “Mark all Processed orders older than 14 days as Completed” · “Mark all orders placed after 05/22/2026 as Completed”
• Create a discount coupon: “Create a 10% off cart-wide coupon called LASTCALL that expires next Friday”
• Create a Sales Report: “Give me a report of revenue by category for Q1, only Completed orders, grouped by month”. The Copilot shows you a preview with the actual data first. Say “save it as Q1 Category Revenue” and it becomes a normal CS-Cart Sales Report you can re-open from the Reports page any time.

For any of these, the Copilot first shows you what’s about to change: 5 example rows plus the total number of things it’s about to change. It asks “Reply yes to apply” and only makes the change once you say yes. When it’s done, the answer includes a link to your admin so you can view or undo the change in one click.

What the AI Can Do Behind the Scenes

You ask questions in plain English. Behind the scenes, the AI works from a fixed list of ready-made lookups and actions to answer you or make the change you asked for.

This is not a list of what you can ask. It’s the list of what the AI CAN DO inside your store to answer you. You never see these names, and you never have to word your question in any special way. Ask however you want. The AI figures out what to use.

Why this matters: every one of these uses your store’s own built-in reports and tools. The AI never invents its own way to look at your data. That means all your existing safety rules and access limits stay exactly the same. A vendor’s Copilot can’t accidentally see another vendor’s data, because your store’s own rules already stop that.

Sales and Revenue (5 tools)

• Order counts, total revenue, and average order value over a date range (grouped by day, week, month, or year if you want).
• Full money breakdown: gross revenue, refunds, net revenue, refund rate.
• Where sales are coming from: by country, state, or city.
• Tax collected per country or per state.
• Payment method mix: order count and revenue per payment method.

Products and Catalog (7 tools)

• Top-selling products (by units sold or by money), optionally just for one category.
• Sales history for one product code: see how it sold day by day, week by week, or month by month.
• What people usually buy together: pick a product and see what customers put in the cart alongside it.
• Product options that sell best: for a product with size or color choices, which combination is the top seller.
• Categories breakdown: your top categories with number of orders, number of customers, and how many products in each.
• Top brands by money made and units sold (works with any “brand” feature you’ve set up on your products).
• Search keywords: what your customers have been typing into your store’s search box (all-time).

Inventory (3 tools)

• Low-stock products: anything at or below a stock threshold, with recent sales info if you want it.
• Reorder priority list: products sorted as Out-of-Stock, Urgent, Soon, or OK.
• Stockout forecast: how many days each product will last at the current sales speed.

Customers (4 tools)

• Top customers by how much they’ve spent, or by how many times they’ve ordered.
• Newest customers sorted by when they signed up (with contact details if you ask).
• Are new customers coming back? For customers who joined during a time you pick, see how many kept ordering month after month.
• Average money each customer spends over their whole time with your store, grouped by which year (or month) they joined.

Orders and Fulfillment (6 tools)

• Look up specific orders by ID: status, date, totals, items, vendor, storefront. Line items and customer contact info on request.
• Most recent orders: pick how many you want, with vendor and (optionally) customer info.
• Status breakdown: how orders split across your status codes.
• Time to ship: average hours from when an order is placed to when it first ships out, overall or per vendor.
• Abandoned carts this week or this month with total cart value.
• Quick “how many X are there” counts for orders, products, customers, or shipments.

Returns and Refunds (1 tool) (needs the built-in RMA addon)

• Returns breakdown: how many returns, total refund value, refund rate, top reasons, and most-returned products.

Discounts, Shipping, and Customer Groups (4 tools)

• Discounts list: your active cart discounts and how many times each one has been used.
• Discounts actually used: which promotions customers used, and how much money you gave away in total.
• Shipping method breakdown: how many orders and how much money for each shipping method.
• Customer group breakdown: sales split by customer type (useful if you have different pricing for wholesale, retail, or membership levels).

Multi-Vendor (2 tools)

• Per-vendor sales totals across the store.
• Vendor commission summary: the same numbers as the standard Vendor Payouts page.

Sales Report Tools (9 tools) (store admin only)

• List all your saved reports and the charts inside each one.
• Look at one saved report in detail: what it shows, how it filters, how it groups the numbers.
• Show what you can group a report by (categories, products, customers, locations, and more).
• Show the time groupings you can use (day, week, month, or year).
• Run a saved report, and you can pick a different date range than it was saved with.
• Preview a new report from a description: see the actual numbers without saving it first.
• Save the previewed report as a real CS-Cart Sales Report you can re-open from the standard Reports page.
• Change a saved report: edit it without starting over.
• Delete a saved report.

Change-Your-Store Actions (4 tools) (store admin only)

Each one shows you a preview first. The AI always tells you how many things will change and shows you a sample. Then it asks “reply yes to apply” before it actually does anything:

• Bulk price change: raise, lower, or set new prices across a whole category or a list of specific product codes.
• Bulk stock change: set stock to a new number or add to what’s there, across a category or a list of product codes.
• Mark orders complete: pick specific order numbers, OR pick all orders in a status (one status, several, or every status) from a date range you choose.
• Create a discount coupon: a cart discount with a code you pick.

Who It’s For

Store Owners and Admins

Full access to everything. Ask anything about your sales, stock, customers, or orders. Use the change-your-store actions (bulk price change, bulk stock change, mark orders complete, create coupon) when you want to make lots of changes at once without clicking through screen after screen.

Vendors (Multi-Vendor stores, admin-controlled)

Vendors don’t get the Copilot by default. You (the store admin) turn it on by ticking the “Enable AI Copilot for vendors” checkbox in the addon settings. Once enabled:

• Vendors get their own Copilot chat in the vendor panel.
• Every question they ask is limited to their own products, orders, and customers only. They can’t see another vendor’s data, no matter how they word the question.
• They see their commission balance, their repeat customers, their stock, their orders.
• Each vendor uses their own AI service key and their own monthly budget.
• Vendors can’t use the change-your-store actions or the Sales Report tools. Those stay admin-only.
• Turn the checkbox off any time and vendors lose access right away.

Installation

1. Go to Add-ons > Manage add-ons, click Manual installation, and upload the addon zip file.
2. Activate the addon and enter the license key.
3. Find “CartModules: AI Store Copilot” in the list and make sure it is set to Active.
4. Open the addon settings and paste the API key for the AI service you want to use (Anthropic Claude by default).
5. Open AI Copilot from the admin sidebar. Type a question and press send.

Configuration

General Settings

• AI provider: pick which AI service answers your questions. You need an account and an API key with that service.
• API keys: one field per provider. Paste the secret key you generated in your provider account. It’s stored hidden and never shown again.
• Model IDs: the specific model name for each provider. The defaults work well for shop questions. Only change if the provider’s docs suggest a different model.
• Assistant brand name: the name the AI uses when introducing itself. Change it to your store name to make the chat feel like part of your brand.

Cost Controls

• Monthly budget (USD): the addon stops answering when your monthly cost reaches this amount. Enter it in US dollars (for example, 30 for $30, or 9.99 if you need cents). Raise the cap when your admins are asking lots of questions.
• Budget warning notifications: turn on to get a warning when your monthly cost reaches 80% and again at 90% of the cap. Warnings reset on the 1st of each month.

Access and Trust

• Enable AI Copilot for vendors: turn on to give vendors their own Copilot in the vendor panel. Turn off to keep the Copilot admin-only. Off by default. This is the main on/off for everything to do with vendor access.
• Read-only mode: turn on to block every action that would change your store data (bulk price/stock adjust, mark orders complete, create coupon, save/update/delete reports). The Copilot can still answer questions and preview reports. Great for giving read-only access to junior staff, or when you don’t want the AI making any changes.
• Show what the AI looked up: turn on to see a small “Show details” link under each answer, so you can check what the AI looked up and how long it took. Turn off if you’d rather keep answers clean and simple. On by default.

Getting an API Key

You’ll need an account with one of the six AI services listed earlier. Sign up, generate an API key from your account page, paste it into the matching field in the addon settings, and you’re ready.

Sample Questions to Try

(These are just examples. Ask anything in plain English.)

• “What were my top 5 sellers last month?”
• “Show me my 10 newest customers who signed up this month with their names, emails, and phone numbers.”
• “What’s running low in stock? Sort by days-until-empty.”
• “When will SKU JE-529 run out at the current sales speed?”
• “Which categories are growing fastest this quarter?”
• “How many abandoned carts do I have this week and how much are they worth?”
• “What’s my refund rate this month and which products come back most?” (needs the RMA addon)
• “Of customers who signed up in January, how many are still ordering?”
• “Which customers spent the most this quarter?” (contact info hidden unless you add “with their names and emails”)
• “Where are sales coming from? Top 10 countries this year?”
• “How much tax did I collect by state last quarter?”
• “How fast are we shipping orders, broken down by vendor?”
• “What do people usually buy with product JE-529?”
• “Which size and color of DG-4348 sells best?”
• “Show me my saved reports.”
• “Run my monthly sales report with last week’s dates instead.”
• “Preview a report of revenue by category for Q1, Completed orders only.”
• “Show me details for order #38.”
• “What’s the status of orders 42, 50, and 61?”
• “Raise all prices in Men’s Clothing by 10%.” (the Copilot will preview and ask you to confirm)
• “Create a 10% off cart-wide coupon called LASTCALL that expires next Friday.”
• “Mark order #38 as Completed.”
• “Mark all Processed orders older than 14 days as Completed.”
• “Mark all orders placed after 05/22/2026 as Completed.”

Privacy and Security

Your data is safe because the Copilot only sends the AI provider what’s needed to answer your question. When you ask something, the AI provider receives your question text plus the numbers and short text your store returned to answer it (things like product names, category names, order totals, and dates). That is all. Your CS-Cart admin passwords, database credentials, and system settings never leave your server.

Your customers’ private information is protected by default. Names, emails, phone numbers, and physical addresses are automatically hidden and replaced with stand-ins before your question ever leaves your server. The AI provider only sees the real values when you specifically ask for them (“show me their contact info”, “include emails and phones”). If you don’t ask, they stay hidden.

Sensitive account details are never sent, no matter what you ask. That includes:

• Customer passwords or admin passwords. These are stored as one-way hashes in CS-Cart, so the Copilot has no way to read them anyway.
• Credit card numbers, bank details, or any payment information.
• API keys, secret tokens, or system settings you have saved in your CS-Cart admin.

The AI can only do things from a safe list. It has a fixed set of lookups and actions it can use. It can never invent its own way to look at your data. Everything it does uses your store’s own built-in tools. This means all your safety rules and access limits stay in place automatically. Ask any question you want. The AI just picks from this safe list to answer.

Answers are cleaned up too (unless you asked for contact info). If you didn’t ask for contact info, any emails, phone numbers, or postal codes in the answer are replaced with stand-ins before you or the history log see them. If you did ask for contact info, the real values are shown and saved to the history log too, so when you re-open the chat later it reads exactly the same way. The chat sidebar titles and any file you download are always cleaned up. A downloaded file never carries real contact info off your server.

• Off-topic questions are blocked on your own server (weather, jokes, news, coding help, and so on) before your question ever reaches the AI service.
• Safety limits per question: the AI can look up things at most 10 times per question, and won’t repeat the exact same lookup more than 3 times. Together, this makes it impossible for the AI to get stuck going in circles.
• All lookups only READ your data. The AI doesn’t get any special powers. It uses the same normal read access anyone else at your store has.
• Anything that changes data always asks first. Bulk price change, bulk stock change, mark orders complete, create discount coupon, and save/change/delete a Sales Report: none of these happen without your clear “yes”. The AI always tells you how many things will change and shows a sample first. Turn on Read-only mode to switch off all of these at once.
• Vendors only see their own data. On Multi-Vendor stores, every lookup has a limit built in that the AI can’t remove. Sales Report actions stay admin-only. Vendor access is off by default. You turn it on with the “Enable AI Copilot for vendors” checkbox in the addon settings.
• Chats are private to the person who started them. Only you see your own chat history in the sidebar. Nobody else on your team can see your chats.
• Vendor API keys are stored hidden (shown as dots on the vendor settings tab). Anyone who can already edit that vendor’s company page can see the key, the same as they could see anything else on the vendor’s edit page.

Requirements

• CS-Cart Multi-Vendor (Single Storefront or Multiple Storefronts), or CS-Cart Store Builder (Single Storefront or Multiple Storefronts), version 4.6.3 or later.
• PHP 7.4 or later.
• An API key from at least one of the six supported AI services (Anthropic Claude, OpenAI, Google Gemini, Mistral AI, DeepSeek, or OpenRouter).
• Your server needs to be able to make outgoing HTTPS calls to the AI service you pick.

Works With Standard CS-Cart Only

The Copilot works with your store’s default CS-Cart data: products, orders, customers, categories, and the built-in sales reports. It also works with a few standard CS-Cart add-ons like RMA and vendor payouts.

The Copilot does NOT know about custom changes your developers may have added on top of CS-Cart, such as:

• Custom product fields added outside CS-Cart’s standard product features.
• Custom order fields, custom order tables, or custom checkout flows.
• Custom sales reports built with code the AI hasn’t been taught about.
• Data added by third-party add-ons that don’t follow CS-Cart’s standard data structure.

If you want the Copilot to work with your custom data too, we can build a custom version for your store. Get in touch and we can talk through what’s possible.

Compatibility

Works with CS-Cart Multi-Vendor and Store Builder editions, Single Storefront and Multiple Storefronts, version 4.6.3 or later.

Support

For support, updates, and feature requests, contact us at www.cartmodules.com.