Tidio Lyro for a small online store: a setup that holds up

Tidio is a common first choice for small and mid-sized online stores: it installs in minutes on Shopify, WooCommerce and most site builders, and its AI agent, Lyro, can be answering questions the same day. That speed is the point, and also the risk. A Lyro set up in ten minutes answers from whatever it found in those ten minutes.

This note is a setup and maintenance routine for a store with one person looking after chat, which is most stores that use Tidio.

How Lyro learns and what it costs

Lyro answers from data sources you give it: your website, which it can import, an FAQ, and question-and-answer pairs you add by hand. Tidio describes Lyro as answering only from that knowledge, not from general internet content.¹

It is billed by conversation. Tidio counts a Lyro conversation as any customer interaction where Lyro replied at least once, however many messages follow, and plans include a one-off allowance of 50 free conversations to start.² Two consequences:

• a conversation where Lyro gave a wrong answer still used quota;
• a widget that asks for an email address before Lyro answers can use quota and lose the customer at the same time.

1. Import the website, then prune it

Let Lyro import your site, then look at what it took. Remove:

• old blog posts with prices, delivery promises or policies;
• category pages whose only text is a promotional banner;
• duplicate pages, such as a UK and an EU version of the delivery page, unless you sell to both and the questions make clear which applies.

If you change a page later, the imported copy doesn’t always change with it. Make a note of which pages Lyro learned from, so you know what to refresh.

2. Write Q&A pairs for the questions that cost money

Q&A pairs are the most reliable source Lyro has, because each one is a short, exact answer to a question. Don’t spend them on what the website already answers clearly. Spend them on the questions where a wrong answer costs you:

Question	Why it deserves a Q&A pair
“Can I return it if I opened it?”	Exceptions get lost in long returns pages
“Is shipping free?”	Thresholds change with promotions
“When will it arrive if I order today?”	Cut-off times and weekends
“Do you ship to [country]?”	Lists of countries are easy to misread
“Is the price including VAT?”	Matters for business buyers and non-EU customers
“Can I change or cancel my order?”	Depends on whether it has shipped

Write each answer in two or three sentences, with the exception in the same sentence as the rule. Add the words customers use: “send back”, “refund”, “money back”, not only “return”.

3. Test in the Playground, then outside it

Tidio’s Playground lets you chat with Lyro in a sandbox and add a Q&A pair right there when it doesn’t know an answer.¹ Use it to find gaps.

Then test the way customers do: on your live site, on a phone, in a private browser window, in plain language and with follow-ups. Some problems only appear there, such as a pre-chat form that blocks the question, or a widget that opens on top of the checkout button.

For every answer, write down the page that should have answered it and whether the answer matches. The Playground shows you missing answers; it doesn’t flag confident wrong ones.

4. Decide what happens when Lyro doesn’t know

When Lyro can’t answer, the conversation can go to a person on live chat or to a ticket. For a small team, the honest setup is usually:

• during opening hours, hand over to live chat;
• outside them, say plainly when someone will reply, and collect the email only then.

Asking every visitor for an email address before any answer is common and costly. Shoppers asking “how much is delivery to Ireland?” rarely want to give an address to find out. We see it often enough that it has its own page: asking for data before answering.

5. A monthly fifteen-minute routine

1. Open last month’s Lyro conversations and read the ten shortest. Short conversations are often the ones where the customer got an answer and left; check that the answers were right.
2. Ask Lyro the six questions from the table above, on the live site.
3. Re-import or update any page you changed this month.
4. Check the quota usage against the number of orders. If conversations rise and orders don’t, look at what customers are asking.

Before peak season, run the longer list from testing your chatbot before peak season.

When to bring in help

Lyro is good at the questions it has a clear source for. Most of the work is in the sources: reading your pages the way a customer would, finding where they contradict each other, and writing the short answers that hold up. If you’d rather not do that yourself, Assistant Setup does it once and Assistant Care keeps it current. Our Tidio Lyro page lists the mistakes we see most on Lyro bots.

Footnotes

1. Tidio Help, “Lyro, the conversational AI agent”, help.tidio.com. ↩ ↩²

2. Tidio, pricing, tidio.com/pricing. ↩