AI Country Recommendations for WooCommerce

The Recommendations panel picks out the countries most worth your attention in the selected period and ranks them by opportunity. Each row names the country, the signal that flagged it, and a suggested next step.

This panel works even without an API key. The countries are chosen by a scoring calculation that runs on your own server. An AI key only changes the wording of the suggested action — with no key you still get the full ranked list, using built-in wording, and nothing is sent anywhere.

The panel shows at most five countries — the highest-scoring ones. Seeing it requires the manage_woocommerce capability.

The four signals

Signal	What triggers it	Why it matters
High value, low volume	Average order value at least 1.4× your store average, and order count at or below a quarter of your busiest country’s.	Customers there spend well above average but there are few of them — usually the clearest case for more marketing spend.
Sharp drop	Sales down 25% or more against the previous period of the same length.	Worth investigating — shipping rates, stock, tax settings or a payment method may have changed.
Fast riser	Sales up 20% or more against the previous period.	Momentum worth reinforcing while it lasts.
Emerging market	The country produced orders this period and has no prior-period figures at all to compare against.	A market opening up that you may not be targeting yet.

Countries with fewer than three orders in the period are ignored, so a single order does not produce a recommendation.

How the five are chosen

Each qualifying country gets one signal and a score, and the five highest scores are shown. When a country could qualify for more than one signal, this is the order that decides it:

Priority	Signal	Roughly scores
1	High value, low volume	Highest — rises further the more the country’s AOV exceeds your store average
2	Sharp drop	High — rises with the size of the fall. Takes precedence over Emerging market
3	Fast riser	Medium — rises with the size of the increase
4	Emerging market	Lowest — rises with the order count

In practice a country with an unusually high average order value outranks one that is simply falling, and a falling country outranks a rising one — on the basis that a problem is more urgent than momentum you already have. Where two countries score identically, neither is preferred and they appear in the order the report produced them.

"Emerging market" here means no previous-period figures at all, with a floor of 3 orders. The Country Anomaly Alerts panel also uses the word "emerging", but for detecting a change rather than ranking an opportunity, and it uses a floor of 5 orders against a six-window baseline. The two are deliberately separate, so a country can appear in one and not the other.

What each row shows

Column	Description
Country	The country flagged, with its flag and name.
Signal	Which of the four signals applied.
Suggested action	A one-line next step, written for that specific country and its numbers.
Orders / AOV / Change	The figures behind the recommendation, so you can judge it yourself.

Recommendations are suggestions, not instructions. They are based only on the sales figures in the selected period — they know nothing about your margins, stock, shipping costs or marketing plans. Treat them as a shortlist of things to look at.

Cost

Choosing and ranking the countries is free — it happens on your own server. A provider is only called to write the action sentences, and only when AI is enabled with a saved key. Those written actions are cached for 24 hours on the same basis as the AI Insights Summary.

With no key saved, the panel costs nothing at all and still ranks the same five countries.

Tuning the thresholds

Developers can adjust the cut-offs with the srbc_opportunity_thresholds filter. It receives an array with these keys and defaults:

Key	Default	What it controls
`aov_multiple`	`1.4`	How many times the store average order value counts as "high value".
`low_volume_frac`	`0.25`	Fraction of your busiest country’s order count at or below which a country counts as "low volume".
`min_orders`	`3`	Countries with fewer orders than this are ignored entirely.
`riser_pct`	`20`	Percentage increase at or above which a country is a fast riser.
`drop_pct`	`-25`	Percentage change at or below which a country is a sharp drop. Negative.

Like the rest of the report, recommendations follow your selected date range and country type. A short range gives you a short, noisy comparison — a month or more usually produces steadier signals.

Troubleshooting

Problem	What to check
The panel is empty	No country met a threshold in this period. Widen the date range, or lower the thresholds with the filter above.
Fewer than five recommendations	Expected — only countries that actually qualify are shown. Five is a maximum, not a target.
The suggested actions read generically	No API key is saved, so the built-in wording is used. Save a key under WooCommerce → Settings → Sales by Country for actions written for your specific figures.
A large market never appears	High value, low volume excludes your busiest countries by design, and a stable market triggers neither a rise nor a drop. That is the panel working as intended.
Everything is flagged "Emerging market"	Those countries have no previous-period data. Common right after a Past Order Import when history only reaches back so far, or on a very short date range.