Ask a Question About Your Country Sales

The Ask panel lets you type a question about your country sales in ordinary language and get a written answer back — without building a filter or exporting a CSV.

Where to find it

Analytics → Sales by Country. The Ask box appears only when AI features are enabled and a valid API key is saved.

Asking a question spends money against your API key, so it requires the manage_woocommerce capability — an Administrator or Shop manager. A user who can view reports but is not a shop manager does not see the Ask box and cannot bill your account.

Example questions

Which countries grew fastest?
Top 5 by average order value
Where did I lose ground?
Compare my top two countries

These are offered as one-click suggestions under the box, so you can try the feature without thinking of a question first. You are not limited to them — type anything about the country figures on screen.

What it can and cannot answer

Answers are drawn only from the country sales figures for the date range currently on screen. Change the range, or switch between billing and shipping country, and the same question can return a different answer — because it is being asked of different data.

Type of question	Answered?
Comparisons, rankings and totals by country	Yes
Growth and decline against the previous period	Yes
Anything about individual customers or orders	No — that data is never sent
Products, coupons or stock levels	No — see the note below
General questions unrelated to your report	No — it will say so rather than answer

Product questions are not answerable here, even though the report shows products. When you filter to a single country, the report displays a Best-Selling Products by Country table — but that table is not part of the data the Ask box receives. It is sent country totals only, so "what is my best-selling product in Germany?" cannot be answered. Read it off the products table instead.

The question box is deliberately limited to your report data. Asked something off-topic, it will tell you it can only answer questions about the Sales by Country report rather than guessing.

Cost and limits

Every question is one request to your chosen provider, billed to your own account. Unlike the insights summary, answers are not cached — asking the same question twice sends two requests and costs twice.

Each request is small — the same country digest the summary uses, plus your question — so the cost per question is a fraction of a cent on a typical model.

Setting a daily cap

There is no daily limit by default, on the assumption that you are managing your own provider spend. Developers who want a cap can set one with the srbc_ai_query_daily_limit filter; once set, the panel shows how many questions remain for the day.

Detail	Behaviour
Default value	`0` — no limit
Scope	Store-wide, not per user. Every question from every shop manager counts against the same allowance.
When it resets	At midnight UTC, not in your store’s local time zone.

For a firmer ceiling, set a spending limit in your provider’s own console as well — that applies to the key itself, whatever uses it.

Nothing you type is stored by the plugin. Questions and answers are not written to your database and not written to any log — they are shown once and then gone. Your provider may retain requests under its own policy; see AI Data & Privacy.

Troubleshooting

Problem	What to check
No Ask box appears	AI features must be enabled and a valid key saved, and your user needs `manage_woocommerce`.
The question times out	The plugin waits up to 45 seconds. A slower or larger model can exceed that on a busy server — try a faster model such as GPT-4o mini, Claude Haiku or Gemini Flash.
An error mentioning too many requests, or a 429	You have hit your provider’s rate limit, not a limit in this plugin. Wait a moment and try again, or raise the limit on your provider account.
"No questions remaining today"	A developer has set `srbc_ai_query_daily_limit` on your site. The counter is store-wide and resets at midnight UTC.
The answer contradicts the table on screen	Ask again — the figures come from the same source, but a model can occasionally misread its own arithmetic. The table is always authoritative.
The answer comes back in the wrong language	Ask the question in the language you want the answer in, or state it explicitly ("answer in German"). Smaller models are weaker at this than larger ones.
It refuses a product question	Expected — the Ask box only receives country totals. Use the Best-Selling Products by Country table instead.