Ecommerce Chatbots – What Can They Do for the Ecommerce Industry?

⏱ Reading Time: 8 minutes

When was the last time you landed on a website without a message popping out from the bottom-right corner? Usually saying something like: “Hey! We are right here, let us know if you need any help.”

Most of the time it’s a chatbot.

🚀Read Ecommerce Guide – Introduction & How to Start an Ecommerce Business? 🚀

Brands are heavily relying on these autonomous tools to manage their live chat. As a matter of fact, almost every brand and business is using these tools to provide 24/7 customer support and boost sales. The sheer number of businesses using chatbots is a testament to the fact that these tools are doing something right. Just check out these stats: 

• Chatbots see their biggest implementation in finance, healthcare, education, travel, and real estate industries. (Chatbots Life, 2018)
• In 2020, more than 80% of businesses will be using some form of a chatbot (Outgrow, 2018)
• Chatbots have helped brands save up to 30% of their customer support expenses. (Invesp, 2017)
• Because of chatbots, more than 50% of customers now expect 24/7 customer support  (Oracle, 2016)
• 69% of consumers prefer talking to a chatbot because they are quick and provide accurate, swift replies (Chatbots Magazine, 2018).

However, chatbots haven’t always been like this. We have come a long way from using event-based ones. AI chatbots are now notably prominent in every business domain. Here, we are going to talk about special kinds of AI chatbots currently driving the biggest traction in the market – ecommerce chatbots.

What Are Ecommerce Chatbots?

Understanding ecommerce chatbots is relatively simple. As a business owner, you should be able to distinguish between three major types of chatbots in the market:

Menu-Based Chatbots

These are built to answer a limited set of questions by offering a set of replies to each question. Users are limited to solutions already offered in the menu, as seen in this screenshot:

Picture 1. Menu-based chatbots

Keyword-Based Chatbots

These are a little more advanced, event-driven chatbots. They don’t limit questions to specific lists. Instead, they use keyword identification. Based on keywords, you can program these chatbots to trigger certain events. Such as show a recommended product, article, or transfer to an agent. 

Picture 2. Keyword-based chatbots

AI Chatbots

These work via artificial intelligence, deep learning and Natural Language Processing (NPL) to form their own replies. Here, as a user, you can ask anything relevant to the business and get precise responses. These bots can remember conversations and learn from them. Instead of events or keyword identification, they use context identification to understand and respond to complex questions. 

These chatbots are customized specifically for online stores and ecommerce websites.  Ecommerce chatbots can manage not only your store’s live chat but also do a lot more. Why? To provide an overall seamless customer and business process management experience. And how do they do that? Well, they can:

• promptly answer all kinds of customer questions 
• integrate with your CRM to fetch deep customer data if needed
• understand and respond to queries in ways resembling a natural conversation
• upsell, cross-sell, and market your business using deep analytics
• manage email and push campaigns, as well as the trigger, abandoned cart reminders
• and they are also non-intrusive and interact with customers in a natural, direct way

Read eCommerce Live Chat: Chat more To Earn More.

AI Chatbots in the Ecommerce – 4 Best Examples

Let’s examine the application of AI chatbots in the ecommerce industry through these examples.

1. Precise Recommendations

Since ecommerce chatbots use AI at their core, they can use context analysis to understand customers’ needs and recommend precise products and services. Based on previous experience, customer history, newly registered information, and questionnaires, they can help customers make quick decisions. And also, the chatbot can use the same data to upsell and cross-sell to relevant customers.

Picture 3. Precise recommendation example

2. Tracking Universal Information

Businesses in the ecommerce industry deal with a massive amount of product, customer, market, sales, and shipping data. To manage it, businesses use different tools. Such as CRM, Inventory Management System, Shipment-Tracking System, Conversion Optimization tools, etc. Moreover, you can integrate your chatbot with all these existing systems to seamlessly track multiple streams of information. 

This will help your chatbot offer swift and error-free responses to even the most demanding queries, to point out. Unlike agents, a chatbot doesn’t need to search through each system manually in order to find information and then frame a response.

You can use a single universal integration to manage your internal business processes. For example, keeping a track of inventory and sending low stock alerts to affected departments. In fact, with enough experience, data, and training, an ecommerce chatbot in your inventory management system can also provide precise recommendations about the amount of inventory you should keep in order to prevent stock-outs.

3. Assist in Digital Marketing Campaigns

Apart from customer support and internal business process management, chatbots can also serve as digital marketing managers. If integrated with your marketing tools. They can independently manage your email campaigns. Moreover, you can involve them in your email marketing from data collection to user classification and email automation.

Note that chatbots can use the same data and tactics to manage your push marketing campaigns. In fact, you can create a synchronized channel between your app-based push notifications and website push notifications. The tool can build your subscribers base and classify them into different segments based on customer history, platform, and subscription model. They can send real-time push notifications, schedule notifications, or set up automatic triggers.

For example, set a trigger to send abandoned cart reminders to a customer who has added products in the cart but hasn’t completed their purchase after 2 hours.

4. A/B Testing & Conversion Rate Optimization

Split testing, also known as A/B testing, is a crucial way to improve ecommerce conversion rates. Testing two versions of an element on different sample audiences allow you to decide on the best strategy.

Whether you are creating a new landing page, modifying existing pages, creating email templates, changing the color of your CTA button. Or even changing your website to boost conversion rates, chatbots help you create optimized A/B testing campaigns. Above all, integrating your chatbot with your A/B testing tool can fully automate your campaigns. 

Read A/B Testing in Marketing.

Ecommerce Chatbots Wrap Up

To summarize, this list could just go on if we kept talking about how chatbots and AI can be implemented in the ecommerce industry. Depending on your chatbot technology, there is hardly any limit to the things they improve in your ecommerce business. As shown above, from customer support to marketing and business process automation, a chatbot can notably have a multitude of applications. Contact a chatbot developer today to know about many other exciting things they can offer your business.

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Jessica Bryce is a professional blogger, guest writer, Influencer & an eCommerce expert. Currently associated with ShopyGen as a content marketing strategist. I also report on the latest happenings and trends associated with the eCommerce industry.