Tidio automates the questions every shop shares. We take the ones only your catalog can answer

A general tool that learned e-commerce, and where that stops

It would be convenient to write that Tidio answers FAQs while we sell products, and it is no longer true. Lyro scrapes your support content for its knowledge base, and on a connected Shopify or WooCommerce store it imports your products and retrieves against them, so it recommends from your real catalog rather than from prose. Tidio publish an average of 67% of inquiries automated. For a shop whose products are described adequately in their own descriptions, that is a good agent at a price no engagement-based vendor can meet, and the honest recommendation is to buy it.

The stop is not the feature list, it is what the product data can support. Retrieval over your catalog answers questions your catalog already contains. It cannot answer a question whose answer is a join: "does this fit a 2018 Golf estate with rails?" is not in the product description, not in the help centre, and not returned by any storefront field, because it lives in compatibility data that in most catalogs is not structured yet, or is spread across three supplier spreadsheets and a colleague's memory. A retrieval system asked that question will find the most similar-looking product and describe it confidently. That is the failure mode that costs a return rather than a follow-up message.

So the work we do first is not conversational at all. We get the deciding attributes out of free-text descriptions and into structured fields, standardize the naming that drifted as the catalog grew, and connect whatever outside source actually settles the question. Only then is there something worth reasoning over. It is slower to start than installing a plugin, and it is the reason the comparison ever goes our way.

WooCommerce is the fair test, because we are both on it

Both products install on a WooCommerce store through a WordPress plugin, and both feed the store's products to the agent, so this is the one place where the difference cannot hide behind an integration gap. Tidio imports your products and keeps them in sync automatically, then retrieves over them when a shopper asks. We connect the catalog and the order data too, but the agent is not pointed at the catalog as it arrived. It reasons over the version we prepared, which is the same catalog with the specifications that decide a purchase pulled into fields the agent can actually filter on.

The difference shows up on exactly one kind of question, and it is worth being precise about which. "Do you have this in black?" and "where is my order?" are answered equally well by both, and the cheaper product wins those on price alone. "Will this carrier hold my bike on a car with factory rails?" is answered well by one of them, and only after somebody has done the work of making the answer computable. If your WooCommerce catalog is mostly the first kind of question, this page has argued you into the wrong product and you should stop reading.

What the subscription buys, and what it does not

Tidio's pricing is genuinely accessible and we are not going to pretend otherwise. A free plan carries 50 conversations a month and ten seats, Starter is $24.17 a month, and the trial runs seven days without a card. What is easy to miss is that Lyro is metered separately: the free and Starter plans include 50 Lyro conversations as a one-off rather than monthly, and continuing use starts at $32.50 a month on top of the plan. Two meters is a reasonable model for a product that has to serve businesses which want live chat and no AI at all, and it means the real monthly cost is the plan plus the agent, not the headline.

We bill per conversation, quoted per engagement, because the catalog preparation and the integrations are the work rather than an extra. That is a larger commitment than a subscription and it is the wrong purchase for most businesses on the internet. It is the right one when a wrong-product return costs you the margin on the order plus handling in both directions, which is a number your finance team already knows.

What this looks like in production

Two live deployments carry this argument, and they are the only two we cite. PTC Auto sells over 250,000 automotive parts and supports customers in seven languages across web, social, and their business phone; fitment questions decide most of those conversations, and the agent cut support operations cost by 40%. Dakdragerwinkel.nl matches roof racks, boxes, and bike carriers to a specific car. The customer gives a Dutch licence plate, the agent verifies it against the RDW national registry, checks the shop's own compatibility data, and recommends only carriers that genuinely fit. It resolves 73% of engaged conversations without a human, handles order tracking in 28% of them, and puts products straight into the basket. Both numbers come from production data, not a pilot.