Salla on WhatsApp: AI That Knows Live Stock

Now live. Salla store sync is available on every plan. Connect your store and the assistant starts answering from it.

There are two questions a customer asks on WhatsApp that no FAQ bot has ever been able to answer honestly: "is this in stock?" and "where is my order?" Both depend on what is true in your store right now, and a bot trained on a document is always answering from a copy that was accurate at some point in the past. Price drops, a sell-out, a shipment that moved overnight — none of it reaches a static knowledge base until someone remembers to update it.

We changed where the answer comes from. Instead of learning your catalogue once, the assistant reads your Salla store at the moment the customer asks. Stock, prices, order status, active offers and coupon validity are looked up live, in the second between the question and the reply.

What the assistant can look up

Six lookups cover the overwhelming majority of what customers message a store about:

• Products and stock — whether an item exists, what it costs, and whether it is actually available right now.
• Order status — where an order is and when it is expected.
• Offers — what is discounted today, for the customer who opens with "any deals?"
• Categories — a real answer to the very common opener, "what do you sell?"
• Coupon validity — whether the code someone was given still works, before they reach checkout and give up.
• Shipping and delivery — options, costs and timing.

The Arabic problem nobody mentions

This is the part we spent the most effort on, and the part that decides whether any of the above is useful in this market.

Salla's product search matches text against product names. That is unforgiving in Arabic. فساتين does not contain فستان in either direction, so a search for the plural misses every product named with the singular. الفستان only matches if the definite article happens to be in the product name too. And أحمر typed with a bare alif misses a product written with a hamza. Send a customer's message to the catalogue as they typed it, and you get nothing far more often than you get the right product.

Then there is how people actually write. Nobody messages a store with the word "dress". They write أبغى فستان أحمر — and the longest word in that sentence is the verb, not the product.

So before anything is searched, the question is taken apart: orthography is normalised so hamza and bare alif find each other, the definite article is stripped, the dialect words people wrap requests in are dropped (أبغى، أبي، ودي، عايز، عندكم and roughly fifty others), and the broken plurals of things Gulf stores actually sell are mapped back to their singulars. Then several spellings are tried, not one.

The failure this exists to prevent is specific: the false negative — the bot telling a customer you don't carry something you do carry. That loses the sale, and it teaches the customer the bot is useless. It is a worse outcome than the stale price this whole design set out to remove.

What it deliberately will not do

An assistant with live data access is only worth having if you can trust its limits. Three are enforced in the system itself rather than left to the model's judgement.

It will not claim an order was changed. The assistant can read your store; it cannot cancel, amend or refund. When a customer asks for something that changes an order, it hands the conversation to a person rather than implying it has acted.

It will not say an item doesn't exist because a search missed. A lookup returning nothing means nothing matched that particular search — not that the store doesn't sell it. The assistant is instructed to say it could not find the item and offer to look differently, which is both more honest and more likely to recover the sale.

It will not invent live data. Anything about a specific order, price, stock level or availability has to come from a lookup. If no lookup provides it, the assistant says so instead of guessing from context.

Who is allowed to see an order

Order numbers in Salla are short and effectively sequential. Treating one as proof of identity would mean anyone able to guess a nearby number could read a stranger's delivery address and basket. So disclosure is tiered, and the decision is made by the system rather than by the model.

A customer messaging from the same phone number that is on the order gets the full picture. Anyone else — including someone who quotes a valid order number from a different number — gets status and expected delivery only. That is the same bar your own storefront enforces when it puts orders behind a mobile verification, and an inbound WhatsApp message already proves possession of the number.

If a customer doesn't quote a number at all, the assistant finds their recent orders from the number they are messaging from, so "where's my order?" works with no reference number.

What you need to do

Connect your Salla store once. There is no catalogue to upload, no sync schedule to configure and nothing to re-import when your stock changes, because nothing is being copied — the assistant reads the store when it needs to. If you have already connected your store, it is already working.

If you have not connected Salla yet, you can start on the free plan and add your store from the dashboard.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does this replace the knowledge base?

No — it takes over the part the knowledge base was bad at. Your knowledge base still answers policy questions: returns, warranty, how sizing runs, opening hours. Live lookups handle anything that changes on its own, like stock and orders. Use both.

Will customers know they are talking to a bot doing lookups?

They will see an answer, not machinery. The assistant is instructed never to mention tools, lookups or systems — a customer asking about a dress gets told about the dress.

What happens if my store is temporarily unreachable?

The assistant says it cannot check right now rather than guessing or inventing a figure, and can hand the conversation to a person. A wrong stock number is far more expensive than an honest "let me check".

Does this work in English too?

Yes. The same term handling runs for English messages, stripping the filler people write around a product name. The Arabic work is more involved simply because Arabic breaks substring search in more ways.