What Echo Deco sells, and what shoppers ask
Echo Deco sells home décor and seasonal goods from Heraklion, Attica, through an OpenCart 3 store with about 18,000 products in 600 categories. Almost every visitor writes in Greek (97% of questions), and what they ask is what a very large catalogue produces. Three in ten questions are a request for a recommendation: a TV unit in a natural finish, something for a chaise longue, the right category for the Christmas range. Another quarter are about a specific product's details or its price, and one in eight asks whether something is in stock.
A third of those conversations started outside 9 to 6 Athens time. For a shop this size, the job is not knowing the answer; it is finding the right one of 18,000 pages for a shopper who is browsing at eleven at night.
What they connected, and what the assistant answers from
The store installed the Vatdi OpenCart extension in July 2026 and had its first live conversation three days later. The extension synced the full catalogue, categories, manufacturers, information pages, policies and coupons, 18,662 items, so an answer links to the store's own product or category page instead of describing it from memory. The assistant answers in the shopper's language automatically.
Two real exchanges show the pattern. A shopper asked how many days delivery would take if they ordered; the assistant replied that orders usually ship within 3 to 5 working days depending on the shipping method and pointed to the delivery page. Another asked for a replacement ecru canvas for a sun lounger in 109 by 40 cm; the assistant said it had no cover in that exact size, offered the 106 by 39.5 cm cotton cover it does stock, and linked it.
When the catalogue has no answer, it says so rather than inventing one, and offers to take an email for the team. Eight shoppers asked for a person; three conversations were taken over by staff.
What the dashboard shows
Over 103 conversations and 255 visitor messages, 100 were resolved without anyone at Echo Deco stepping in. The median time from a shopper's first message to the assistant's reply was 8 seconds, at any hour. 33% of conversations began outside shop hours and were answered anyway.
As plain arithmetic: 255 messages answered by email at two minutes each is about eight and a half hours of someone's time, most of it now spent elsewhere. That is an illustration, not a measurement; the conversation counts, response times and handover figures are measured.
Published 16 September 2026 with Echo Deco's permission. Figures are read from the store's own Vatdi dashboard for the period stated, with Vatdi's internal test traffic excluded. No figure on this page is an estimate.