Chatbots are quickly gaining popularity in the ecommerce industry. According to statistics, in 2024, global retail spending through chatbots is likely to hit $142 billion.
Interestingly, chatbots aren’t a new concept. The first attempt to build an interface that lets a person converse with a computer was back in 1966. That year, an MIT professor called Joseph Weizenbaum built an Eliza chatbot.
While Eliza helped match up a user prompt to a scripted response, technological advancements have improved how chatbots work.
Chatbots now use AI (Artificial Intelligence), Natural Language Processing (NLP), and Machine Learning (ML) to comprehend and process user queries. This has changed how people communicate with software, search, distill, and acquire information.
Chatbots are thus revolutionizing the ecommerce industry. Their incredible features are changing how online stores are run.
To understand more about chatbots, this guide looks into how they work, their benefits, and some of the best examples in the market to integrate with your ecommerce store to boost sales and drive growth.
Let’s start with the basics:
What is a Chatbot In Ecommerce Stores?
Ecommerce chatbots are AI-powered computer programs implemented by online retailers to simulate human interactions to enhance customers’ shopping experience. They use text or speech to offer prompt assistance and faster responses to customers’ queries.
Through chatbots, businesses can now respond to customer queries promptly without delay.
Also, they don’t require human intervention to respond to questions or recommend products.
This way, customer engagement is not interrupted even when the business owner is away.
How Chatbots Work
Chatbots follow decision trees and scripts to offer responses. Using ML and NLP technology, chatbots can comprehend the human language, which they utilize as an information resource or knowledge base.
They examine user inputs and use them to determine their intent, and then they answer their query or generate a personalized and relevant response.
Chatbots learn from past interactions, which helps them improve how they engage with customers.
Over time, they can engage in more natural conversations and handle complex user issues.
This is done through a process that combines pattern recognition, linguistic rules, and, in some cases, sentiment analysis to understand users’ needs better and offer quick and more accurate responses.
Benefits of Chatbot in the Ecommerce Industry
The ecommerce store owners can benefit from using chatbots in many ways. Here is how these tools help:
Provide Quick Customer Responses
Customers want quick replies when they visit your store. Delayed replies can result in losing customers.
There is no better way to offer quick and accurate replies than using chatbots.
This way, you will retain potential customers due to poor customer interactions.
Offer 24/7 Customer Support and Cut Costs
Most online stores run 24/7. While they may opt to have virtual assistants to help answer customer queries around the clock, this option is costly for many retailers.
That is where chatbots come in. They eliminate this cost and still offer exceptional 24/7 customer support. You can save a substantial amount of money and time with chatbots. 24/7 availability also ensures customer satisfaction.
Provide Personalized User Responses
One of the most unique features of chatbots is their ability to collect data about your store visitors. Then, it leverages it to offer better experiences and product recommendations or suggestions.
Customer information can help understand their needs better. And understanding these needs and preferences lets you personalize your product pages for them.
Additionally, you can notify customers when products are out-of-stock and suggest the ideal alternatives based on their needs and preferences. This promotes brand loyalty.
Scales Customer Interactions
When there is massive traffic and inquiries, how can you ensure you have responded to every query? Chatbots can offer bulk insights at one time. For instance, online clothing retailers like H&M, which receive increased traffic during the festive season, can handle every customer inquiry with chatbots. This boosts sales and ensures customer satisfaction.
Improves Order Tracking
Tracking orders can sometimes be daunting. In such cases, chatbots come in handy. They help improve the process until the items are delivered.
Chatbots can inform customers of the expected delivery date and time. This way, the customer knows the exact stage of their order delivery. This helps keep them at ease and avoid so many questions.
Prevent and Recover Abandoned Carts
Chatbots can also help to reduce or recover abandoned carts. But how? Besides offering prompt responses, chatbots ensure customers get the most relevant answers to their questions.
Also, their services are 24/7, meaning a customer will get a response or the assistance they require in no single day or minute. All this helps reduce or prevent cart abandonment.
Additionally, chatbots can also help recover abandoned carts. They do so through retargeting messages to customers who abandon carts.
They can send them personalized reminder messages about incomplete purchases or incentives for completed purchases.
Collect Customer Feedback and Reviews
Customer feedback and reviews are an integral part of any business’ growth. You need to know what the customers think about the company or the products and services you offer.
And with it, you will know the areas to improve or how to serve your customers better.
Chatbots help gather customer feedback and reviews through conversations with customers. With this feedback, you can ensure your e-commerce business matches your customers’ needs.
Collect Customer Information for Retargeting
Chatbots are also great tools when it comes to collecting customer information. They help learn the customer’s purchase behavior and prompt the customer to offer their details.
This information is crucial during retargeting marketing campaigns. It helps your business keep better records of your customer base and serve them better.
Improved Customer Experience
Customers not only need prompt answers to their queries, but they also need correct and transparent answers that are available 24/7. Chatbots are the best solution for this.
They not only offer prompt and accurate answers, but they can also respond to a massive chunk of customers at a go, which improves customer experience. Human agents are limited in numerous ways. So, chatbots offer the most suitable solution.
Help with Social Media Management
Currently, almost every business has a social media presence. That’s because the most significant number of potential customers are found on social platforms.
Chatbots help your business keep customer engagement alive and ongoing on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, etc.
They help answer DMs and FAQs and assist in responding to comments. Chatbots also offer 24/7 customer support through live chats, ensuring all customer queries are handled.
Best Chatbots in the Ecommerce Industry
If you have an online store, there is no better time to get a chatbot tool than now. But which are the best Chatbots in the market today?
Finding the best platform can be daunting, especially if you are starting. Luckily, we have compiled a list of the best chatbots in the market.
Here is our list of the top chatbots in ecommerce businesses:
Ecommerce Bot’ Omni Channel Chatbot
Ecommerce Bot Omnichannel Bot is one of the best chatbots for online stores. This is not just an innovation but an evolution.
Being the first stand-alone live system enhancing the question and answer capacity in real-time, Ecommerce Bots’ Omnichannel chatbot ensures that every inquiry is answered regardless of complexity or volume.
So, what does it offer?
Let’s find out:
Features of the Ecommerce Bot
Here is what this Omnichannel chatbot features:
Helps in the Persona Selection Process
This e-commerce bot allows you to select and customize chat personas to align with your brand’s voice and tone. This helps maintain brand identity and image.
Offers Workflow Visualization
With Ecommerce Bot, you can create the flow of activities in your store to help the customers quickly find what they are looking for. You can tailor these visual diagrams and animations displaying these workflows to suit your style.
Provides Product Recommendations
The Ecommerce Bot uses customer information to understand their needs and preferences. This information helps it suggest products for the customer or offer alternatives if the product is out-of-stock. These visual examples of AI-driven suggestions appear in the chat interface.
AI Learning Process
Ecommerce Bot learns continuously to understand your customers from past interactions better. This helps it to adapt to their needs and thus enhances their shopping experience.
Benefits of the Ecommerce Bot Chatbot
So, how can you benefit from the Ecommerce Omnichannel chatbot? Let’s explore:
Engagement Across Multiple Channels
The EcommerceBot omnichannel chatbot interacts with customers across all social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok.
This AI-powered chatbot offers 24/7 live chat support to customers, ensuring that no question goes unanswered.
And since social media is the most significant traffic source, the chatbot ensures your business grows.
Easy Communication Process
The EcommerceBot chatbot uses ML (machine learning) and NLP (natural language processing) algorithms to learn and understand customer behavior and queries.
This way, it can provide the most relevant answers to customer questions. This improves customer experience and confidence in your business, which leads to more sales.
Seamless Handoff Between the Chatbot and Live Agents
Not all queries are best handled by the chatbot. When this is the case, the chatbot is designed to offer a seamless handoff to a live agent.
The chatbot does so without losing the chat’s context or history. This way, the live agent can easily handle the query from an informed perspective.
Handles Huge Volumes of Queries at a Time
Unlike human agents, the EcommerceBot chatbot can simultaneously handle large chunks of queries. This not only helps to improve customer experience but also reduces the workload of the live agents. The EcommerceBot chatbot can reduce your live agents’ workload by around 70%.
Saves Time and Money
The more queries your business gets, the more live agents you need to handle. Also, it will take longer to answer all the questions or offer solutions.
However, with the EcommerceBot omnichannel chatbot, all these issues are sorted. First, you don’t have to worry about the number of queries hitting your inbox, as the chatbot can handle all of them promptly. This saves time.
Also, since it can handle so many queries at a go, you don’t need so many live agents. Now, this saves you money.
In essence, Ecommerce Bots’ Omnichannel chatbot keeps the chat going. The best part? You can still customize it to connect to a live agent if that is an option you want to include.
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ChatBot
ChatBot is another chatbot that has redefined customer journeys in ecommerce stores. For starters, it improves customer experience, reduces costs, and reduces query response time without using AI chat platforms like OpenAI, Bing AI, or Google Bard.
ChatBot Features
The main features of ChatBot include:
- The drag-and-drop visual building feature allows you to create your chatbot without coding skills.
- Free chat widget: This allows you to create a unique chatbot for your business in just a few clicks.
- Real-time analytics and reports: This allows you to monitor your customers’ engagement with your stories and identify the ones that perform better in real-time.
- In-platform testing tool: With this tool, you can quickly test your ecommerce chatbot before launching it to ensure it’s exactly what you need.
- Prebuilt chatbot templates: You can create, customize, or reuse the stories you want.
Main Benefits of ChatBot
Here are some of its benefits:
Multiple Data Sources
ChatBot uses multiple data sources to help it understand customers’ needs and serve them better.
It can be trained through various data sources, including websites, text documents, or help centers, to make it more efficient.
You can update all these data sources to ensure the chatbot has the correct information.
Secured Data
With ChatBot, you can rest easy knowing that all your data and that of the customer is secured. This is because all the data on this chatbot is hosted and processed on the ChatBot platform.
Ability to Control Your Bot Responses
ChatBot prioritizes the FAQ module over AI Assist. This gives you power over customer queries and the bot’s responses.
Collects All Customer Data Automatically
ChatBot effortlessly collects your business information. It uses this information to improve customer engagement in every chat. The data helps the chatbot to offer the most accurate responses to customers.
Chatfuel
Chatfuel is also another chatbot you can rely on. It is a messaging platform for ecommerce businesses designed to help marketers and business owners increase lead generation, upsell, cross-sell, or boost whatsap sales.
Chatfuel focuses on providing businesses with chatbots for social media platforms, including Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram.
Main Chatfuel Features
The features of Chatfuel include:
- Built-in CRM: This allows you to segment and qualify your leads.
- Drag-and-drop builder will enable you to create your ecommerce chatbot without coding knowledge.
- Easy integration: It integrates easily with platforms like Shopify, Zapier, and Google Sheets.
- Ready-made templates: It offers over 30 free templates to use.
Chatbot in Ecommerce Store Use Cases
Numerous ecommerce businesses use chatbots to enhance the customers’ shopping experience. Here are some use cases:
For example, Fissler, a cookware retailer, uses a chatbot, Cooky, to assist customers in finding product pages, answering shopping questions, and more. The chatbot pops up anytime a customer is on the site. It combines button options and typed requests to keep the chats going.
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Open SC uses chatbots to ensure transparency in its supply chain. It communicates about the product’s sources and reassures them about their sustainability.
This builds trust and loyalty.
Chatbots in e-commerce remain at the top in boosting sales and conversions. Now is the time if you have yet to start using any chatbot.
