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Best answer

How can I get a chatbot to lookup live stock and price information?

  • October 23, 2025
  • 5 replies
  • 28 views

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I’m trying to create a chatbot for an ecommerce website that is capable of checking live price and stock data. I can provide the price & stock data as a CSV or JSON file, or have it stored in a Zapier Table that is refreshed hourly.

My primary issue is that the most frequent you can update knowledge sources is daily, so theoretically data provided to the bot that way could be almost 24 hours out of date. I therefore want to have the bot fetch the data when prompted by the user (e.g. “Is product x in stock?”)

Is there any way to do that? I thought maybe give the user a Zap Button to check stock, but I can’t feasibly see how to pass the item the user is interested in from the chat content into the Zap (e.g. the lookup value for a Zapier Tables action).

If you could trigger a prompt as Logic, that would be ideal, e.g. “If the user asks if an item is in stock or what the price is, do a lookup for the product in the products table to see if it is in stock”.

Any ideas welcome! 😀

Best answer by Ian Lockwood

Actually I realised I could do what I needed with our existing provider Chatbase in the end, so whilst I had a quick look at Troy’s suggestion, it wasn’t immediately obvious it would do what I needed and I then found another way outside of Zapier.

5 replies

Troy Tessalone
Zapier Orchestrator & Solution Partner
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  • Zapier Orchestrator & Solution Partner
  • October 23, 2025

Hi ​@Ian Lockwood 

Have you explored using the Zapier Chatbot Zap app?

Triggers/Actions: https://zapier.com/apps/zapier-chatbots/integrations#triggers-and-actions

 

You may need to then add one of these Zap steps to isolate the lookup value:

  • AI by Zapier - Analyze and Return Data
  • Code
  • Formatter 

 

 


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  • Author
  • Beginner
  • October 24, 2025

Thanks Troy, I hadn’t spotted the AI by Zapier functions, I think that’s the missing piece of the jigsaw if this is going to work at all. 🙂


SamB
Community Manager
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  • Community Manager
  • November 14, 2025

Hey there ​@Ian Lockwood 👋 How did you get on with the approach Troy suggested? Is everything up and running?

Let us know whether you got stuck at all, want to make sure you’re all set! 


Forum|alt.badge.img
  • Author
  • Beginner
  • Answer
  • November 14, 2025

Actually I realised I could do what I needed with our existing provider Chatbase in the end, so whilst I had a quick look at Troy’s suggestion, it wasn’t immediately obvious it would do what I needed and I then found another way outside of Zapier.


SamB
Community Manager
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  • Community Manager
  • November 17, 2025

Thanks for getting back to me ​@Ian Lockwood 🤗 Glad to hear you found a way to make it work, even if it’s not with Zapier. 

If you ever want to revisit this or have any questions about using AI by Zapier in the future, just let us know - I’d be happy to help!