SSF Live Chat & Product Enquiries

SSF Live Chat & Product Enquiries lets visitors ask questions on your website and lets administrators reply from a local WordPress inbox. Messages remain in the website database. The plugin is open source and does not require an SSF account, license key or hosted chat subscription.

The enquiry workflow keeps a visitor’s public page context and selected product details beside the conversation. When WooCommerce is active, visitors can include product quantities and selected variations, so staff can see what the customer is asking about before replying.

Included features

• Website chat widget with configurable business name, welcome message and accent colour.
• WordPress administrator inbox with replies and conversation close/reopen controls.
• Public page context and optional WooCommerce product enquiries with quantities and variations.
• Visitor consent before saving a conversation; email is optional.
• Random visitor access tokens, stored as hashes on the server.
• Configurable conversation retention and integration with WordPress personal-data export and erasure tools.
• Local CSS and JavaScript. No telemetry, remote license checks or external chat service.

This is a native website chat product, separate from SSF Chat Connect. It does not open WhatsApp, send WhatsApp messages or require a WhatsApp account. It does not send automated replies, independently find sales leads or guarantee enquiries.

Operation and limits

Keep the administrator inbox open while answering visitors. Open, visible chat windows and inboxes poll every six seconds. Presence means recent inbox activity, not guaranteed immediate availability. This plugin relies on your WordPress hosting; it is not a hosted chat-agent service and does not include background mobile notifications.

For bounded requests, the default is 20 product lines per enquiry, quantities from 1 to 9999, 2000 characters per message and 500 messages per conversation. The inbox shows the latest 100 accessible conversations. These are operational limits, not paid unlocks. Basic request limits reduce abuse, but do not replace hosting-level protection. Reverse proxies must preserve the correct client IP for per-IP limits.

WooCommerce is optional. Chat works without it; the product enquiry button is added to compatible classic WooCommerce single-product forms. Custom product templates and block-based forms may need integration. WordPress 6.6+ and PHP 8.1+ are required. Activate separately on each site; network activation is not supported.

Privacy

Visitor names, optional email addresses, submitted messages and selected public page/product details are stored in this website’s database after consent. Only a SHA-256 hash of the random chat access token is stored server-side. The raw token and enquiry selection are held in browser sessionStorage. Closing the tab can lose that browser session; server access tokens expire after 14 days.

Rate-limit records use keyed hashes rather than raw IP addresses. The default retention is 30 days, configurable from 1 to 365 days. A daily WordPress cron event removes up to 500 expired conversations and their messages per run. Cron depends on site traffic or a configured system scheduler. Administrators can use WordPress privacy tools for email-matched exports and erasure; no account or email is required for a visitor to chat.

Deactivation and uninstall preserve records and settings. Site owners are responsible for their privacy notice, lawful data handling, backups and retention policy. No third-party service receives chat data from this Free package.

Optional separate add-ons

The separately distributed Pro add-on includes quotation/follow-up tools and optional Google Cloud Translation. Translation is not included in this Free package. The Free chat workflow works independently; no included feature expires or requires payment. See the product information for the separate editions.

Source code and development

The complete, editable source is included in this plugin ZIP. assets/chat.js is the visitor chat source and assets/admin.js is the operator inbox source. Their corresponding CSS files in assets/ are also supplied in readable form. These exact source files are loaded by the plugin; there are no separate minified bundles, transpiled files or third-party JavaScript/CSS libraries.

No build step, package manager, compiler or external repository is needed. Edit the PHP, JavaScript or CSS files directly, test on a local WordPress installation, and package the ssf-live-chat-enquiries folder as a ZIP. Source is licensed under GPLv2 or later; see LICENSE.txt.