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Running an eCommerce business solely over your website or mobile app is not enough anymore, not even if you provide both options.
On average, most eCommerce mobile apps get uninstalled within 11 days of being downloaded. You need to make it possible for customers to do business with you on the apps they already spend the most time on, and WhatsApp chatbots make that possible.
Why do you need to use WhatsApp for eCommerce?
With over 2 billion users, WhatsApp is the most popular messaging application. And these users spend about 28 minutes actively using WhatsApp every day.
Odds are that your customers are already spending a lot of time on WhatsApp. They would prefer to interact with your business and even place orders directly over WhatsApp.
To make it even better, WhatsApp messages have a 70% engagement rate. If you get a message on WhatsApp, you’re going to open it.
This means that using WhatsApp empowers your eCommerce business to engage your customers on the channel they prefer. It can even help you drive sales directly over a new channel that your customers actively use.
The advantages of using eCommerce WhatsApp chatbots
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WhatsApp chatbots help you do business on WhatsApp at scale. They automate most of your conversations on WhatsApp, answering customer questions in record time, and allowing your employees to focus on higher-level activities.
According to Forrester Research, 53% of online shoppers tend to abandon their cart if they do not get answers to their questions immediately.
WhatsApp chatbots help you answer those questions immediately, aiding you in solving the problem of cart abandonment.
These bots help you make live online shopping much easier for your customers. They don’t need to download another app or even visit a website. All they need to do is open WhatsApp, send a few messages, and they can make purchases, schedule returns and do much more with minimum effort.
You can make WhatsApp messages even more interactive by using interactive buttons with WhatsApp message templates. These buttons can be used to guide your users to a webpage or to let them call you up.
WhatsApp chatbots can use data collected about your customers to personalize their entire experience with your eCommerce store and deliver a better customer experience that is more relevant to their needs.
This helps you increase conversions and boost loyalty and advocacy.
WhatsApp now permits sending promotional messages as broadcasts over the WhatsApp Business API, so you can use your WhatsApp chatbots to send notifcations about discounts, sales, and promotional offers that you are running.
These broadcasts are sent as WhatsApp message templates. Earlier, you needed to go to a WhatsApp business solution provider like 360Dialog to set up and send these message templates, but now you can send them directly on Engati by using the Template Message Node while you’re building your conversation flows.
You can even create campaigns to target these broadcasts to segments of your customer base. You can group customers according to user attributes, upload lists of customers on the basis of the attributes or even set your eCommerce WhatsApp eCommerce bot up to automatically add customers to broadcasts lists according to the actions they take while interacting with your message templates.
How can you use WhatsApp chatbots for eCommerce?
When a customer converses with you on WhatsApp, you can request their name and phone number and use our Google Sheets integration to automatically store that information, along with information about the products they are interested in within a spreadsheet.
When your customers interact with your chatbot on WhatsApp and let you know what kind of products they are looking for, you can use that data to share personalized product recommendations from your catalog. You can display a range of products by sending them carousel messages.
Your customers don’t need to visit your website or download your app to place orders on your eCommerce portal. All they need to do is open WhatsApp and send you a message. They can purchase products directly over your chatbot and even make payments if you integrate your WhatsApp bot with Stripe or another payment gateway.
Customer support needs to be as convenient as possible, and sending a WhatsApp message is far easier than typing out an email or even calling your support team.
These bots make getting support even easier by eliminating hold time and making sure that customers and leads get answers to their queries without needing to wait at all.
WhatsApp chatbots get rid of the effort involved in returning or exchanging purchases. They streamline the process and allow your customers to schedule returns or exchanges directly over the bot.
WhatsApp chatbots make it easy for you to collect actionable feedback from your customers. This can be used to help you understand your customers’ entire experiences with the brand, but also to understand their experience during individual interactions. Engati allows you to do this using a feedback node.
You can use the bot to send automated notifications to your customers about orders, payments, returns, updates to account information (like new addresses being added), etc.
If you have a Shopify store, you can even use your Shopify chatbot from Engati to send abandoned cart recovery notifications.
If your customers have questions about your products that were not answered on your website, they can get all the answers and information that they need over an intelligent WhatsApp chatbot.
You can use WhatsApp message templates over WhatsApp business API to send shipping and delivery information to your customers, easing their anxiety about when their order will be delivered.
Best practices
Don’t misguide your customers into thinking that they are conversing with a human. Let customers know that they are talking to a bot. If not, it is possible that they would be disappointed if they asked a complicated question and the bot could not answer it.
Chatbots and live chat work best together. Around 80% of your inbound queries can be answered by your chatbot, but the complex ones need to be handled by a live agent.
Using live chat along with chatbots helps your customers get answers to all their queries in real-time without needing to wait. It’s also better than asking customers to call your support team or send an email if they need to get in contact with a live agent because it allows them to converse with an agent directly over the same platform in a seamless fashion.
Looking to build a WhatsApp bot?
We make it easy. With Engati, you can partner with Engati and build an intelligent WhatsApp chatbot in just 5 minutes.
WhatsApp for eCommerce [Infographic]
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