Independent bookstores answer the same six questions across four channels every day. Do you have it. What time do you close. Do you take trade-ins. Can you order it. The BOQ chat answers all four channels from one brain, reads your live POS for stock, and books special orders without anyone touching a keyboard.
No questionnaire. No two-week onboarding. The chat reads your existing site, your event calendar, and your POS catalogue, and is ready to answer customers in about an hour.
BOQ crawls your storefront, your About page, your hours, your event calendar, and your most-recent newsletter. It maps store sections (kids, fiction, used, signed editions, cafe, ticketed events) and sets up the FAQ tree.
Step two: connect Lightspeed, Shopify, or Square so the chat reads live SKUs. Step three: test against last week's customer messages from your IG, FB, and email inboxes. Live by the weekend.
Independent bookshops in Picton, Wellington, Bloomfield, and Quinte West all field the same ten core questions. The chat ships pre-loaded with answers tuned to your inventory, your trade-in policy, your event calendar, and your hours. Edit any answer in plain English from the dashboard.
The store closed at 6pm. The owner is making dinner. A regular customer messages on Instagram. The chat reads the live shelf, places a hold, and confirms pickup the next morning. The owner sees the transcript at 7am with coffee.
Same brain. Same inventory feed. Same trade-in rules. Same event calendar. The customer doesn't have to pick the right channel; the bookstore doesn't have to staff four. Phone calls go through a voice front-end (Tier 2 unlock); IG, FB, and email all hit the same chat backend.
No more "let me check the back, can I call you back." No more selling a copy that sold an hour ago. The chat reads your POS catalogue every five minutes and knows what's on the shelf, in the back room, on order, and out of print.
Plug-and-play with the four POS systems most county bookstores actually run. No middleware, no overnight sync, no manual SKU export. The chat queries on demand and reserves on confirm.
Every customer query triggers a fresh look. Stock counts, location (front shelf vs back room vs cafe display), used vs new, signed-edition tag, special-order ETA, sale price. Anything in your POS, the chat can answer about.
Same engineering as the chatbots Bell and Indigo run. Priced for a 1-to-3 person shop with a cafe, a Sunday trade-in window, and a Wednesday author reading. Calibrated against your live POS, hosted by BOQ, owned by you.
Stripe takes its standard 2.9% on actual deposits. No per-message fees. No usage overages. Cancel anytime, walk with your knowledge base, transcripts, and customer list.
After 30 days the chat has logged every question your customers actually asked. Patterns surface fast. Authors getting asked about that you don't carry. Genres your shelf is thin on. Books people are ordering elsewhere. Every pattern is a content pack, a window display, or a buy decision.
The chat noticed. Five of the eight asked because they'd heard it on the CBC literary podcast. Three asked because of a New Yorker piece on Jon McGregor. Nobody asked for a different McGregor title. The shelf has zero McGregor.
Recommended action: order 6 copies of Reservoir 13, plus 2 of Lean Fall Stand, build a small staff-pick display, and run a content pack on the BOQ blog featuring McGregor + your inventory + the Wellington reading group.
No CMS login. No "let me email my web person." If you want to feature Wednesday's author reading on the homepage banner, you tell the chat in plain English and it confirms the change in 30 seconds. Connected to Shopify storefront, WordPress, or Squarespace.
The owner wants the Marianne Dunn reading featured on the home page until Wednesday night. Spoken to the chat from her phone while she's locking up.
Same workflow for shelf updates, pricing changes, hours changes, holiday closures, and pulling expired event banners. The chat reaches into Shopify, Lightspeed, or your CMS via secure connector and writes the change.
30-day pilot. Calibrated against your live POS and a year of your customer messages. Live across phone, Instagram, Facebook, and email by the weekend.