@rahul_vendure/ai-chat-plugin

AI-powered shopping assistant plugin for Vendure e-commerce. Adds an LLM-driven chat endpoint to your Vendure server with product search, vector search, cart management, order tracking, and checkout assistance.

Features

• LLM Chat — GPT-4o-mini powered shopping assistant via Vercel AI SDK
• 14 Built-in Tools — search, vector search, collections, price filter, add-to-cart, cart view/adjust, order history/tracking, checkout (addresses, shipping)
• Streaming — Real-time streaming responses via POST /ai-assistant/stream (compatible with useChat() from @ai-sdk/react)
• Non-streaming — JSON response via POST /ai-assistant/chat
• Vector Search — pgvector-powered semantic search over products and collections
• Auto-Embedding — Automatic embedding generation on product/variant/collection create/update/delete
• Bulk Embedding — Admin GraphQL mutation triggerEmbedAll to embed all existing catalog data
• Embedding Entities — Registers TypeORM entities for vector storage (requires pgvector and a migration)

Requirements

• Vendure >=3.0.0
• PostgreSQL with pgvector extension
• OpenAI API key

Installation

npm install @rahul_vendure/ai-chat-plugin

Prerequisites

1. Install pgvector — The pgvector extension must be installed in your PostgreSQL instance. Enable it by running:

   CREATE EXTENSION IF NOT EXISTS vector;

2. Run migrations — The plugin registers the entities with Vendure, but you must generate and run a database migration to create the tables and vector columns:

   npx vendure migrate

Setup

1. Add the plugin to your Vendure config

// vendure-config.ts
import { AiAssistantPlugin } from '@rahul_vendure/ai-chat-plugin';

export const config: VendureConfig = {
    // CORS — allow your storefront origin so the browser can call /ai-assistant/stream directly
    apiOptions: {
        cors: {
            origin: ['http://localhost:3001', 'https://my-storefront.com'],
        },
    },
    plugins: [
        // ... other plugins
        AiAssistantPlugin.init({
            openaiApiKey: process.env.OPENAI_API_KEY!,
            embeddingModel: 'text-embedding-3-small', // optional, this is the default
            assetBaseUrl: 'https://my-vendure.com/assets/', // optional, auto-detected in dev
        }),
    ],
};

2. Embed your catalog

After starting the server, run the triggerEmbedAll mutation from the Admin API (GraphiQL at /admin-api):

mutation {
    triggerEmbedAll {
        jobId
        message
    }
}

This generates vector embeddings for all products, variants, and collections in the background. You only need to run this once — after that, embeddings are automatically kept in sync on create/update/delete.

3. Add the frontend

Use the companion package @rahul_vendure/ai-chat-react for a drop-in React chat UI:

npm install @rahul_vendure/ai-chat-react ai @ai-sdk/react

<VendureAiChat vendureUrl="https://my-vendure.com" />

See the @rahul_vendure/ai-chat-react README for full docs.

Configuration Options

API Endpoints

POST /ai-assistant/stream

Streaming endpoint compatible with the Vercel AI SDK useChat() hook. Returns a UI Message Stream response.

The @rahul_vendure/ai-chat-react package connects to this endpoint automatically — you don't need to call it manually.

Request:

{
    "message": "Show me laptops under $1000",
    "history": [
        { "role": "user", "content": "Hi" },
        { "role": "assistant", "content": "Hello! How can I help?" }
    ]
}

Auth: Pass a Bearer token in the Authorization header for logged-in user features (cart, orders).

POST /ai-assistant/chat

Non-streaming endpoint. Returns the full response as JSON after all tool calls complete.

Response:

{
    "message": "Here are some laptops I found!",
    "products": [
        { "id": "1", "name": "Gaming Laptop", "slug": "gaming-laptop", "price": 89900, "image": "https://...", "variantId": "42" }
    ],
    "collections": [],
    "addToCartAction": null,
    "activeOrder": null
}

CORS

The React frontend connects directly to the Vendure server from the browser (no proxy needed). You must configure CORS to allow your storefront origin:

export const config: VendureConfig = {
    apiOptions: {
        cors: {
            origin: ['https://my-storefront.com'],
        },
    },
};

In development, Vendure allows all origins by default, so no CORS config is needed for localhost.

Tools

The AI assistant has 19 built-in tools:

Entities

The plugin adds three entities to your database:

• product_embedding — Vector embeddings for products
• variant_embedding — Vector embeddings for product variants
• collection_embedding — Vector embeddings for collections

Admin Dashboard AI Chat

The plugin also includes a built-in admin chat endpoint at POST /admin-ai-chat/chat with admin-specific tools:

To add the admin chat UI to your Vendure dashboard, install the companion package:

npm install @rahul_vendure/ai-chat-dashboard

See the @rahul_vendure/ai-chat-dashboard README for setup instructions.

Exported Services

For advanced use cases, you can inject these services in your own plugins:

import {
    AiChatService,          // Storefront chat service
    AdminAiChatService,     // Admin dashboard chat service
    EmbeddingService,
    ProductEmbeddingService,
    VariantEmbeddingService,
    CollectionEmbeddingService,
} from '@rahul_vendure/ai-chat-plugin';

License

AGPL-3.0 — see LICENSE for details.