Adding an artificial intelligence chatbot to your WooCommerce store makes it possible to start a dialogue with your visitors. But not all artificial intelligences are equal: some models may answer better than others. And beyond that, the same model will give different answers depending on how broad the question is.
To clearly illustrate the difference between AI models for an online store, we compared ChatGPT 5.3 Instant, Gemini 3 Flash, Gemini 3 Flash Lite, Mistral Large, Mistral Medium 3.1 and Mistral Small 3.2 using the exact same question.
Test method
For these tests, we ask a question to Fabio AI Chatbot in our demo store, which contains 1,000 products.
There are 4 categories with 250 products each: beauty, electronics, fitness, and home & kitchen.
We chose a question that requires Fabio AI Chatbot to cross-reference several pieces of data:
I am looking for a power bank that can last 10 hours and costs less than 50 USD
Let us now compare the content and response times of these 6 AI models.
ChatGPT 5.3 Instant response
ChatGPT 5.3 Instant takes 5 seconds to answer and suggests 3 products by responding exactly to our question, but in a concise way.
It gives us the model names, battery life, and price. Let us remember that the chatbot had to sort information across 1,000 product pages.
Gemini 3 Flash response
The response from Gemini 3 Flash takes 8.5 seconds, is less readable, but contains the same information.
Gemini 3 Flash even adds a small friendly sentence for the user.
Gemini 3 Flash Lite response
The response from Gemini 3 Flash Lite takes 8.6 seconds and looks very close to that of its bigger sister, Gemini 3 Flash.
The answer gives us the same products as its competitors, in a block without bullet points, and adds a commercial mention taken from the product page content.
Mistral Large 3 response
It only takes 3.3 seconds for Mistral Large 3 to answer, but it gives only 2 search results, compared with 3 for Gemini and ChatGPT.
The text is easy to read, does not bother with too many details, and answers the user’s question exactly.
Mistral Medium 3.1 response
The response from Mistral Medium 3.1 arrives after 2.7 seconds.
In this example, this artificial intelligence model gives us only one product in return, whereas the others give two or three. But Mistral Medium 3.1 therefore answered quickly by giving the model that best matches our question.
Mistral Small 3.2 response
We get the same response with Mistral Small 3.2 as with Mistral Medium 3.1.
As we can see, the response is concise and once again contains only one product, the one that comes closest to the question. The response time is 2.2 seconds, which is the fastest among the 6 models in this test.
Which AI model is best suited for an e-commerce store?
By default, Fabio AI Chatbot from Fabio-Plugins.com is set to ChatGPT 5.3 Instant. We decided that it was better for our audience to get a wider choice of answers, knowing that questions on the site will be technical only.
If you think that your audience wants fast answers, Mistral models do indeed respond the fastest, but only provide one product as a search result.
Let us note that Fabio AI Chatbot is configured to provide several URLs with its search results, which allows users to navigate more easily.
If you believe that your audience needs more explanations, or a more human dialogue, then Gemini seems to be the AI model best suited to provide that solution.
You can easily run the test with each of these models. Mistral AI offers an interesting number of free tokens so that you can carry out several tests. Gemini offers very few free tokens, enough for only a few tests. Finally, ChatGPT from OpenAI requires you to top up tokens before you can start testing.
The good news is that a top-up of 5 USD is enough with OpenAI, while 3 USD is enough with Gemini to begin testing.