By Amit Zeno, founder of Chatonbo
What store owners ask before buying an AI chatbot
We read the other side of our own sales conversations: 973 chats that prospective customers had with the assistant on chatonbo.com over eight months. One in five is about price and what is free, one in seven asks what the product does, one in eight mentions Shopify, and two thirds stop after a single question. Every figure carries its sample and date.
84% of visitors who ask a chatbot vendor about price ask it in their very first message.
Key statistics
- 19.2% of pre-sale conversations with a chatbot vendor are about price, plans or whether there is a free version (163 of 849 conversations that went beyond a greeting or a test, same window).
- 84% of visitors who ask a chatbot vendor about price ask it in their very first message (137 of 163 price conversations, 973 pre-sale conversations with the assistant on chatonbo.com, March 27 to November 9, 2026).
- 16.1% of pre-sale conversations with a chatbot vendor open with a question about price, plans or a free version (849 conversations that went beyond a greeting or a test, same window).
- 15.1% of pre-sale conversations with a chatbot vendor ask what the product is or what it can do (128 of 849 conversations that went beyond a greeting or a test, same window).
- 13.0% of pre-sale conversations with a chatbot vendor mention Shopify, against 1.5% for Wix, WooCommerce, WordPress, Squarespace and Webflow combined (849 conversations that went beyond a greeting or a test, same window).
- 7.4% of pre-sale conversations with a chatbot vendor ask whether the product will work for the visitor's kind of business or website (63 of 849 conversations that went beyond a greeting or a test, same window).
- 64.9% of substantive pre-sale conversations with a chatbot vendor consist of a single visitor question (849 conversations that went beyond a greeting or a test, same window).
- The median visitor message to a chatbot vendor's assistant is 4 words long, and 15.5% of messages contain a question mark (1,769 visitor messages in 973 pre-sale conversations with the assistant on chatonbo.com, March 27 to November 9, 2026).
- 12.7% of conversations with a chatbot vendor's assistant are only a greeting or a test message (124 of 973 pre-sale conversations with the assistant on chatonbo.com, March 27 to November 9, 2026).
- 8.7% of conversations with a chatbot vendor's assistant include a request for something the product does not do, such as generating an image or playing a game (85 of 973 pre-sale conversations with the assistant on chatonbo.com, March 27 to November 9, 2026).
- 2.7% of pre-sale conversations with a chatbot vendor end with the visitor leaving an email address or phone number (26 of 973 pre-sale conversations with the assistant on chatonbo.com, March 27 to November 9, 2026).
- 19% of pre-sale conversations that ask about sales, conversions or ROI end with contact details (5 of 26), against 3.1% of conversations about price (5 of 163) (849 conversations that went beyond a greeting or a test, same window; small counts).
- 90.4% of pre-sale conversations on an English-language chatbot vendor site are in English, 5.8% in Hebrew and 3.8% in another language (973 pre-sale conversations with the assistant on chatonbo.com, March 27 to November 9, 2026).
Free to cite and reuse with attribution to Chatonbo (CC BY 4.0).
What the conversations are about
Share of the 849 substantive conversations that touch each topic. A conversation can touch more than one, so the shares do not add to 100. Topics under 1.4% (AI model, limits, languages, booking, privacy, comparisons, partnerships, cancellations) are listed in the methodology.
The first thing they type
Topic of the opening visitor message, as a share of the 849 substantive conversations. Price leads by a wide margin; installation questions, which a vendor might expect to dominate, come tenth.
Price comes first, in every sense
Pricing is the largest topic, and when a visitor has price on their mind it is almost always the first thing they type.
19.2%
of pre-sale conversations ask about price, plans or whether there is a free version.
Nearly one conversation in five. The single most common word across those questions is "free", ahead of "price" and "cost". A buyer wants to know the floor before they look at anything else.
Source: 849 conversations that went beyond a greeting or a test, same window
84%
of visitors who ask about price ask it as their very first message.
137 of the 163 price conversations opened with the price question. Buyers do not warm up to it; they lead with it. A pricing page that makes them hunt is answering a question they asked a minute ago.
Source: 849 conversations that went beyond a greeting or a test, same window
15.1%
ask what the product is or what it can do, in general terms.
The second biggest topic is orientation: what does this do, how does it work, what can it handle. These visitors arrived from a search or an ad with a problem, not with product knowledge.
Source: 849 conversations that went beyond a greeting or a test, same window
13.0%
mention Shopify by name.
Store platform is the third thing on a buyer's mind, and Shopify dominates it: nine times as many conversations as Wix, WooCommerce, WordPress, Squarespace and Webflow put together (1.5%).
Source: 849 conversations that went beyond a greeting or a test, same window
Short, fragmentary and done in one
A pre-sale chat with a software vendor looks like a search box, not a sales call.
64.9%
of substantive conversations are a single question and nothing more.
The median conversation has one visitor message; the mean is 1.8. A quarter of conversations run to two or more questions, and the long dialogue is rare.
Source: 849 conversations that went beyond a greeting or a test, same window
4 words
is the median length of a visitor message, and only 15.5% contain a question mark.
People type the way they search: "pricing", "shopify app", "free plan". An assistant on a vendor site has to recognise a fragment as a question and answer it in full.
Source: 1,769 visitor messages in 973 pre-sale conversations with the assistant on chatonbo.com, March 27 to November 9, 2026
12.7%
of all conversations are only a greeting or a test ("hi", "test", "hello").
One visitor in eight opens the chat to see whether it is real. What the assistant says back is the first impression of the product.
Source: 973 pre-sale conversations with the assistant on chatonbo.com, March 27 to November 9, 2026
8.7%
of conversations include a request for something the product does not do.
Image generation, games, homework, roleplay. Visitors test a public assistant as if it were a general AI. A vendor assistant needs a polite, scoped refusal ready.
Source: 973 pre-sale conversations with the assistant on chatonbo.com, March 27 to November 9, 2026
Who leaves contact details
A lead is a conversation in which the visitor left an email address or phone number. Lead rates by topic rest on small counts and are shown with them.
2.7%
of pre-sale conversations end with the visitor leaving contact details.
Low by the standard of a store assistant (12.8% in the baseline study), and expected: the natural next step on a vendor site is to sign up, not to be called back.
Source: 26 of 973 pre-sale conversations with the assistant on chatonbo.com, March 27 to November 9, 2026
5x
the lead rate when the visitor asks about results or their own content rather than price.
Visitors who asked about sales, conversions or ROI left contact details in 19% of conversations (5 of 26), those asking about training the assistant on their own content in 14% (5 of 35), against 3.1% of price conversations (5 of 163) and 3.9% of "what does it do" conversations (5 of 128). The intent is in the question.
Source: 849 conversations that went beyond a greeting or a test, same window; small counts, directional
90.4%
of conversations are in English, 5.8% in Hebrew and 3.8% in another language.
The site is in English. Hebrew and Arabic visitors wrote to it in their own language anyway and were answered in it. On a vendor site, the assistant is the only multilingual page.
Source: 973 pre-sale conversations with the assistant on chatonbo.com, March 27 to November 9, 2026
What this means for anyone selling software to store owners
- Put the price and the word "free" where the first message would land. A fifth of buyers ask, and 84% of them ask before anything else.
- Answer "what does it do" in one paragraph, not a feature grid. One buyer in seven arrives without a mental model of the product.
- Lead with the platform the buyer names. On this site that is Shopify, nine to one over every other platform combined.
- Treat "will it work for my business" as a page, not an FAQ line. 7.4% of buyers ask it, in their own category's words.
- Expect four-word fragments and one-shot visits. If the first answer does not land, there is rarely a second question.
- Watch the question, not the volume. Visitors asking about results and their own content were five times as likely to leave contact details as visitors asking about price.
Methodology
Sample: 973 conversations between visitors and the AI assistant on chatonbo.com, March 27 to November 9, 2026, after removing dashboard test sessions. Only the visitor side was analysed: 1,769 visitor messages, after dropping 28 messages that contained an email address or a phone number and matching every message against the visitor name stored with the conversation (none matched). No message is quoted anywhere, and the assistants running on customer websites were not read for this study. 124 conversations (12.7%) contained only a greeting or a test message and are excluded from the topic figures, which rest on the remaining 849 substantive conversations. Topics were assigned by keyword rules over the sanitised text in English and Hebrew; a conversation counts toward every topic it touches, and the opening-message topic is the first message that was not a greeting. Topics below 1.4% of substantive conversations: AI model and accuracy 0.8%, limits and quotas 0.6%, languages 1.1%, booking and non-ecommerce use 0.8%, something not working 0.9%, WhatsApp and other channels 1.1%, API and developer questions 0.6%, privacy and security 0.6%, leads and CRM 0.8%, comparisons with other chatbots 0.5%, partnerships and white label 0.2%, cancellation 0.2%. Language is detected from the writing system for Hebrew, Arabic, Cyrillic and East Asian scripts and from vocabulary for Latin-script languages; one-word Latin messages are counted as English. A lead is a conversation in which the visitor left an email address or phone number. Lead rates by topic rest on 26 leads in total and are directional. Volume was not even across the window: 17 conversations in March, 115 in April, 183 in May, 189 in June, 76 in July, 79 in August, 46 in September, 215 in October and 53 in the first nine days of November.
Pre-sale questions FAQ
What do people ask a chatbot vendor before buying?
Price first. In 973 pre-sale conversations on chatonbo.com between March and November 2026, 19.2% of substantive conversations were about price, plans or a free version, 15.1% asked what the product is and does, 13.0% mentioned Shopify and 7.4% asked whether it would work for their kind of business. Everything else, from installation to customisation to human handoff, was under 5% each.
Is pricing really the first thing buyers ask about?
Yes. 16.1% of all substantive conversations opened with a price question, and 84% of the visitors who asked about price at any point asked it in their very first message.
How long is a pre-sale chat with a software vendor?
Short. 64.9% of substantive conversations were a single question, the median visitor message was four words long, and only 15.5% of messages contained a question mark. Visitors type fragments the way they type into a search box.
How often does a pre-sale chat produce a lead?
2.7% of conversations ended with the visitor leaving an email or phone number. The rate was about five times higher when the visitor asked about results (sales, conversions, ROI) or about training the assistant on their own content than when they asked about price, on small counts.
Where does this data come from?
From the AI assistant on chatonbo.com itself, the one that talks to prospective customers. 973 conversations between March 27 and November 9, 2026, excluding dashboard test chats. Messages containing an email address, a phone number or the visitor's name were removed before analysis, and no message is quoted. Customer assistants on other sites were not read for this study.
Can I cite these numbers?
Yes, with a link to this page (CC BY 4.0). Use the quote line in the Cite this block. The data will be refreshed and the dates updated.
Cite this
19.2% of pre-sale conversations with a chatbot vendor are about price, and 84% of the visitors who ask about price ask it in their first message. Source: Chatonbo, What store owners ask before buying an AI chatbot, 973 conversations, March to November 2026, chatonbo.com/research/what-store-owners-ask-before-buying-a-chatbot-2026
Chatonbo (2026). What store owners ask before buying an AI chatbot: 973 pre-sale conversations analyzed. Chatonbo Research, November 9, 2026. https://chatonbo.com/research/what-store-owners-ask-before-buying-a-chatbot-2026
Free to quote with attribution (CC BY 4.0).
Related: What shoppers ask an AI chat assistant · Chatbot lead generation statistics 2026 · Chatonbo pricing
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