The Problem

For a shopper buying from another country, one question outranks all others before they'll commit: *what will it actually cost to get this to my door, and when?*

Shipping price to their country. Delivery time to their region. Whether they'll be hit with customs duties or import VAT on arrival. These are the anxieties that kill cross-border carts — and they're rarely answered clearly on a product page, because the answer depends on where the shopper is.

Most chat widgets can't help. They either don't know shipping rules, or they answer in English with a generic "see our shipping policy." For an international shopper, that's not an answer — it's a reason to abandon.

This feature makes the assistant answer the question directly, for the shopper's country, in the shopper's language.

What You Get

Shipping cost by destination. The shopper asks "how much is shipping to Poland?" and the assistant answers with the actual rate for their country, drawn from your configured shipping zones — not a vague "it depends."

Delivery time estimates by region. "When would it arrive?" gets a real estimate based on your fulfillment and the destination, so the shopper knows whether it'll make it in time.

Customs and duties clarity. The single most anxiety-inducing unknown in cross-border buying. The assistant explains, for the shopper's country, whether they should expect import duties or VAT on arrival — and whether you charge them at checkout (DDP) or they pay on delivery (DDU) — based on your policy.

Everything in the shopper's language. A Polish shopper asks in Polish and gets shipping, timing, and customs answers in Polish. The cross-border conversation happens entirely in the language they're comfortable buying in.

Why This Matters

This is your moat, not just parity. Any widget can bolt on a product recommender. Almost none answer "what will this cost to land in my country, in my language" well. This feature sits exactly at the intersection of your two differentiators — multilingual and cross-border — and it's genuinely hard for a generic, English-first competitor to match.

It removes the #1 cross-border purchase blocker. Unexpected duties and unclear shipping costs are among the top reasons international shoppers abandon. Answering them upfront, in the shopper's language, directly recovers carts that would otherwise be lost to uncertainty.

It builds trust at the decision moment. A shopper who gets a clear, confident answer about total landed cost trusts the store more than one left guessing. That trust is what converts a hesitant international visitor into a buyer.

It's the question your target customers' shoppers actually ask. Your Tier 1 segment is cross-border e-commerce. Their shoppers are, by definition, buying across borders — which means this question comes up on nearly every order. Answering it well is answering the defining need of the segment you're chasing.

How It Works

The assistant draws on your store's shipping configuration — zones, rates, and delivery estimates — synced from Shopify or WooCommerce, plus a duties/VAT policy you set per region (or a general statement of how you handle import charges). It detects or asks for the shopper's destination country, then answers shipping cost, timing, and customs for that specific destination.

Where exact duty amounts can't be determined precisely (they vary by product category and value), the assistant is honest about that — explaining what to expect and who pays, rather than inventing a figure. For complex or high-value orders, it can hand off to a human with the destination and cart context attached.

All of it runs through the same multilingual pipeline as the rest of the assistant, so a shopper anywhere gets the answer in their own language without any extra setup from you.

What This Replaces

The generic "see our shipping policy" link that sends an international shopper to an English page they have to interpret. The abandoned cart from a shopper who couldn't tell whether they'd be charged duties. The support email asking "how much to ship to my country" that gets answered hours later, after the shopper has already bought elsewhere.

On the Roadmap

This feature is planned, and builds on the store integration and [Product Catalog Sync](/roadmap/product-catalog-sync). When it lands:

Shipping cost and delivery-time answers by destination country, from your synced shipping zones
Customs and duties guidance per region, reflecting whether charges are collected at checkout or on delivery
Destination detection with a fallback to simply asking the shopper's country
Full multilingual delivery, with honest handling of cases where exact duty amounts can't be computed

Once live, the assistant answers the question that decides most cross-border purchases — clearly, for the shopper's country, in the shopper's language — which is precisely where Companin pulls ahead of every English-first competitor.