The eCommerce market has become the need of the hour and is expanding Rapidly. With increasing user demand, it has become essential to maintain the uninterrupted flow of services around the clock. Catching up with the growing needs of buyers is one of the most important trends in the online commerce market.
When companies found that it's difficult to fulfill the growing needs of the customers and adapt as per them, they switched to automation.
As a result, we have AI chatbots for eCommerce that can amplify customer-driven and customer-centric practices through conversational chatbot eCommerce.
What are eCommerce Chatbots?
eCommerce Chatbots are artificially intelligent systems that online retailers can deploy to engage their customers throughout the customer journey. eCommerce stores can use these chatbots to answer questions about their products directly on the website or even on other messaging platforms like WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook Messenger, etc.
These eCommerce chatbots are used for conversational marketing and tackling any worries that customers may have regarding the product before they make the purchase. These bots are used for conversational commerce as well as providing after sales support intelligently and instantly, without needing to involve a human customer service agent.
5 reasons why your eCommerce business needs a chatbot
Today, many eCommerce companies rely on artificial intelligence and machine learning to understand the buying pattern of millions of users. This helps them build a successful marketing campaign and pitch products to the buyers accordingly.
This kind of growth in eCommerce represents that people have shifted towards such tech-based AI platforms. Conversational AI can have a range of benefits for your eCommerce store and the entire eCommerce worldwide market. Here are some of the main ones:
Check out the demo video of Engati's customer support chatbot solution for b2b eCommerce platform here to know more about conversational ai chatbot commerce!
How to build eCommerce chatbot flows?
The first thing you need to do is decide the goal for your eCommerce chatbot. Do you want it to provide customer support? Maybe you want it to act as a catalog for your products on other touch-points like WhatsApp, Telegram, and Messenger. Or, perhaps you’d like to use it to drive sales over these channels. Whatever your goal is, it needs to be clearly defined.
After doing that, you’ll need to gain a deeper understanding of your users, their needs want, and the issues they face.
Now you get into building the actual flow for your eCommerce chatbot. Engati’s low-to-no code visual chatbot flow builder makes this a breeze.
Here’s an article that gives you a deeper understanding of how to build chatbot flows.
Pro tip: Give your bot a personality, your customers will love it
11 ways how chatbots can supercharge sales and support for your eCommerce store
AI chatbots in eCommerce remember the past interactions of the users and use them further to customize future conversations. Moreover, bots can keep the focus on customers while guiding them down the sales funnel and providing product recommendations. Plus, by personalizing the services, you boost the engagement rate, and also save the time of customers by promoting relevant products. Check out this article to learn more about building effective personalized strategies.
AI chatbots enable eCommerce businesses to get hands-on real-time user interaction. This information can be analyzed to improve the services as per the user input. The instant access to critical data reduces the operation cost, and also maximizes the efficiency and functioning of a business.
One of the benefits of chatbots in ecommerce is that it can handle 80% of the repetitive simple questions of your customers, they can help customer service executives to keep the locus of support to solve complex queries. By addressing complex queries with priority, you can win more customers while reducing the operation cost.
According to a report by slicktext, more than 50% of customers expect businesses to be open 24/7. Chatbots remember user interactions and queries. They are available 24X7 and they respond instantly.
eCommerce businesses that can't maintain instant support tend to shut down because competitors were operating and providing support 24/7.
With instant support and two-way communication, bots can establish a real connection with the users.
AI-powered chatbots can answer 80% of the repeated customer queries. And, in case it fails to address the issue, it will instantly transfer the query to a live chat agent. A bot can tell users about the offers and benefits of paying online.
Chatbots in eCommerce websites within the eCommerce market offer responses to FAQs, capture customer reviews, and solve complex customer queries. These are essentially designed to clear the clutter that a buyer might encounter while making a purchase.
If your customers realize they need to make a purchase while they're using another social media app, wouldn't it be better if they could make that purchase from you, directly over that app?
Opening your website or app can feel like too much effort, they don't want to switch across platforms. Luckily, you don't need them to.
By deploying a chatbot on WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Telegram, and 10+ other touch-points, you empower them to browse your catalog and make purchases directly over the platform they're already using.
It reduces customer effort and gives them an omni-channel experience.
The process of educating customers with necessary information is easy with AI-based chatbots. For example, when a customer selects a specific product, the bot will offer one-touch access to the FAQ section within the chat screen. Moreover, if customers require additional information, the chatbot can take in the input and present the required information within seconds.
As a result, the interaction between the eCommerce chatbot and its users simplifies the buying process, thus boosting engagement rate and sales.
Storytelling is a pure form of art. When infused with an AI chatbot for eCommerce, it can help connect brands with customers. This ultimately enhances the engagement rate once AI chatbots master the conversations by learning from user inputs.
In a way, eCommerce businesses don’t just sell products to their customers. Instead, they educate them about the product and keep it alive in their memory. They engage visitors using interactive tools, such as Images, gifs, videos, and audio. This ultimately leads to more engagement with the brand as the chatbot grasps your customer's attention more effectively, making the sales process easier.
In eCommerce, there is nothing more valuable than interested buyers. These buyers mark their favorite products on the website. Either they make an instant buying decision or they abandon their carts and wish-list section in the cold state for months. As a result, millions of products don’t reach the customers.
Fortunately, AI bots are changing this practice altogether. The benefits of chatbot in ecommerce is that it can understand the requirements of the visitors by analyzing the products in their carts and wish-list. Further, bots can recommend better products to users. This can result in the growth of the customer base as well as an increase in sales.
AI bots can engage with users with the help of automated email sequences and instant responses. AI bots can engage with users with the help of automated trigger. There is a lot of cheap email marketing software that can help you automate your email marketing campaigns. Moreover, eCommerce businesses can take advantage of chatbots for persuading customers to fill up forms and collect the data.
Your eCommerce chatbot can contribute to the success of your lead generation strategy as it can collect lead information in a range of ways, ranging from capturing data directly in the conversation flow or even allowing customers to fill forms natively in the bot.
There are two ways an eCommerce business chatbot can get the feedback of the consumers.
The first is via reviews and the other is via web forms. If a business puts too much focus on collecting manual reviews then sooner or later they will realize that it is not cost-effective. This process is, in fact, too time-consuming. Hence, very few consumers post their genuine reviews.
On the other hand, in case of the delivery of a defective product, a customer makes sure to post a bad review.
Bad reviews hurt the business and that’s why there’s a need to enhance the customer experience. Via AI chatbots, eCommerce businesses can trigger the feedback collection process as per the defined time. Then a bot can get the feedback of the users while interacting and sympathizing with them. And, assuring them that their issue has been transferred to the concerned team in real-time.
This way, you can reduce the impact of bad marketing via AI chatbots. Instead, the chance is that people may promote your platform as the most reliable one among their friends and family members.
When most people think of an AI-powered chatbot they consider it as a conversational interface. But, when utilized correctly, they can act as a goldmine.
Right user metrics can do wonders for your business. But, traditional tools fail to fetch important details regarding the interaction of the website visitors. However, an AI-based eCommerce chatbot can collect exclusive details of the users in real-time like, interaction with products, preferences, what they disliked, and how they responded to the chatbot, etc. When utilized correctly, these user details are no less than a gold mine. They can help eCommerce businesses to enhance the customer experience by improving the services in the right direction.
Explore Engati analytics dashboard.
How do chatbots add value to eCommerce websites?
Have you ever wondered what leads to cart abandonment? Well, let's unfold this mystery.
According to Forrester, 53% of online shoppers abandon their carts if they do not receive instant answers to their questions.
This means that simply offering email support won’t help it anymore. And they’re not going to wait or hold over a phone call. Customers need answers as soon as the question arises. Now, you can’t overload every webpage with minute detail about the product and services. The best that you can do is to deploy a chatbot for your eCommerce website and keep the ball rolling. This brings your business even more value when your bot has a live chat system integrated with it. Now even your customers’ most complex queries can be answered in real-time, saving more carts than ever before.
11 key metrics to monitor on your eCommerce chatbot
According to Applied AI’s report, eCommerce businesses need to keep an eye on these metrics:
The three metrics you need to focus on the most
AI chatbots allow you to get an overview of the total messages sent by the users. This data can help in understanding the engagement of the visitors, and if the conversational flow is intact or not. Businesses look for further categories that help them build a proper conversational flow for better bot performance and user engagement.
Note: If you are getting good website traffic but low bot-visitor engagement rate, then you should consider revising the conversational flow of your bot. If you would like to seek help from Engati, check out our bot marketplace!
With an eCommerce AI chatbot, businesses can get easy access to information such as, how many users visit the website. This serves to be useful because visiting users don't just add to the traffic but businesses must engage them so they become potential buyers.
Tip: Engati builds chatbots for eCommerce and retail businesses. If you would like to take a look, visit this link!
In addition to the above-discussed metrics, The user stats section gives businesses a combined list of analytics of user engagement. It displays the duration of the bot conversation for the average sessions per day, average incoming messages per user, and more.
All this information can work as a goldmine for eCommerce platforms. Moreover, by introspecting the overall performance of the chatbot you can understand the behavior of the website visitors to improve engagement.
Conversational commerce can be used to connect with prospective customers at all stages of the customer journey—from engagement to product purchase—in increasingly personalized ways.
- Emarketer report on Conversational Commerce.
End-to-end support for eCommerce
From sales and promotion pushes, to eCommerce site search catalog searches, personalisation, product orders, payments, order tracking and fulfilment to post-sales customer support and returns - all from a customer's smartphone via a messaging app - for intelligent customer interactions and queries - always available 24x7 and none of the uninstall issues faced by a traditional mobile app. It's easy, it's free to start and it's the future of interactive and conversational eCommerce - it's Engati. Come to experience the future of online retail like no other chatbot platform can provide - with out-of-the-box integrations for your popular eCommerce store software so you don’t have to change a thing.
Is your mobile app strategy in disarray? Do customers frequently uninstall your app? Have you spent large amounts building your app and larger amounts in promoting it, only to deal with uninstall rates of more than 70%? Your answer could be Engati.
Shopify chatbots - why you need one for your online store?
Shopify chatbots do more than just answer your customers' queries. They help you tempt your customers to make a purchase at the times when they are most likely to give in to the temptation.
When your visitors land on a product page, scroll through it, spend a certain amount of time on it, are about to exit it, or even add or remove a product from their carts, your Shopify chatbot can trigger a message to them with a discount code or promotional offer. This lets you reel them in and get them to convert from browsers to customers.
Your Shopify bot can even help you slash down your cart abandonment rate. Wondering how?
Let’s say a customer visits your eCommerce store and adds a few products to their cart. But then they abandon their cart and exit your website. Typically, you’d consider sending them a cart abandonment email. But you might just be waiting on a miracle for them to read that.
Instead, you could just get your Shopify chatbot to shoot out a cart recovery offer to that customer on WhatsApp, where around 99% of messages are opened, thus lowering your abandonment rate substantially.
2 eCommerce companies succeeding with intelligent chatbots
Skippi Ice Pops from India operates as an Ice Popsicle brand that produces high quality products which are clean, green and healthy. Due to high volume of website traffic, they wanted to integrate WhatsApp as a channel to effectively handle multiple inquiries and generate revenue.
Using Engati, they were able to get a green tick for their WhatsApp account with ease. Additionally, they utilized the Broadcast feature to effectively run their marketing campaigns.
This integration helped them increase their conversion rate within a span of 2 days.
Hola BB, an Amsterdam-based online boutique, sells eco-friendly baby products. They wanted to simplify online shopping, and optimize customer engagements. Hola BB also wanted to scale up from their existing live agent setup.
Using Engati, they were able to create an intelligent chatbot that engages customers in Dutch. They even managed to achieve a two-week time to value for their bot.
The bot currently handles 96.8% of all their customer queries. It was even integrated with Shopify to answer questions about orders and returns. Here's how a Shopify chatbot can help your Shopify store increase conversions.
Poppy’s is a major retailer based out of Panama.They chose to drive sales over a WhatsApp chatbot in addition to their website chatbot. They also opted for Engati Live Chat, combining automation and the human touch.
Their bot provides customers with information about their orders in English as well as Spanish.
Since Poppy’s catalog is frequently updated, it does not make sense for them to waste time manually training their bot on a continuous basis.
Instead, they use our DocuSense technology to reply to customers with answers pulled directly from documents that they upload to their chatbot.
Don't build your bot from scratch
You don't need to do all the heavy lifting. Our starter packs provide you with eCommerce and retail chatbot templates that can be easily tweaked to your requirements.
See how Engati's chatbot templates improve conversational chatbot marketing.
Conclusion
eCommerce chatbot always thrive to delight their customers with an unparalleled experience. But, with traditional tools of engagement, it eventually results in average customer satisfaction.
Good customer experience will always lead to a good customer satisfaction rate. For this, conversational chatbot marketing is coming out to be quite useful.
eCommerce businesses often struggle to with improvising customer experience. This is mainly because unhappy customers are unlikely to return and make a purchase again. Therefore, it’s important to understand if a customer is happy with the services or not. Conversational chatbot marketing opens a door for customers to express what they’re feeling so businesses can understand and empathize with their customers.
Apart from the business perspective, it’s extremely important to get the feedback of the users. It can help detect the weak points in the chatbot conversation flow that may include incorrect answers, poor conversation design, repetitive responses, and knowledge gaps.
