WooCommerce Store Credit (the official woocommerce.com extension) stores credit as a special coupon type. Each credit balance is represented by a coupon with the store_credit discount type, an amount, and an associated customer email. When an admin refunds an order as credit, the plugin creates or tops up that coupon and the customer can apply it at checkout. SleekAI's data-source wizard maps store-credit coupons by customer email or user id into named variables the system message can reference at request time.

That means a logged-in customer asking about their balance gets the actual balance from the matching store_credit coupon. A customer asking whether a refund landed as credit can be told the exact coupon amount and creation date. The bot also explains redemption rules (one coupon per order, applied at checkout) without inventing details the plugin does not enforce.

For shops with long refund histories, push older coupons into an OpenAI Files vector store of up to one gigabyte per file so the model retrieves only what matches the question. Every conversation is logged inside WordPress with model, tokens, and originating page URL so a customer service manager can audit what the bot told a buyer about their credit.

Store credit is one of the smallest, stickiest tools an online shop has. It turns a refund (which costs money and customer goodwill) into a future order (which earns both back). But the experience around store credit is fragile.

A customer who cannot remember whether they have credit, cannot find the email, and cannot get a straight answer from chat will simply not use it. The credit sits on a coupon nobody redeems. A generic chatbot bolted on the storefront makes this worse because it cannot read the store_credit coupon at all and tends to invent expiry rules the plugin does not enforce.

SleekAI removes the friction. The bot quotes the actual balance from the matching coupon, names the order that produced it, and explains the redemption rules in plain language without inventing extra constraints. That single experience is enough to convert most refunded customers into repeat buyers, because the cognitive cost of using their credit collapses from an email-archaeology project into one chat reply.

There is also a customer service upside. The bot can flag an order for goodwill credit, name the customer, attach the chat transcript, and hand off to a logged-in shop manager for approval. The manager issues a fresh store_credit coupon in one click.

The customer hears about it in the same conversation. That is the kind of low-friction recovery moment that builds long-term loyalty without changing the underlying refund policy. Cost stays controlled too.

SleekAI is a one-time plugin licence with no per-message markup. The AI calls run on the merchant's own provider key. The WooCommerce Store Credit extension licence stays separate and the bot does not add markup on the underlying credit it reports.

The chatbot is part of the same WordPress install everyone already opens to manage refunds.