TOPICS: Chatbot for Ecommerce   Chatbot for Lead Generation    Chatbot Trends   

Ecommerce Chatbot – How Can Ecommerce Companies Drive Sales with a Chatbot?

It hasn’t taken long for ecommerce chatbots to go from promising lead generation tools to core features of prominent online shopping websites. Their popularity stems from a simple fact – they work. Over time, ecommerce businesses that create a chatbot boost their sales, build a pool of repeat customers, and create a strong foundation for further growth. If you’re an ecommerce business owner, here’s how ecommerce chatbot development can help you drive sales and increase revenue.

Creating a familiar ‘storefront’:

Chatbots have had a meteoric rise in popularity over the past couple of years. In the field of online shopping in particular, customers have come to expect the presence of a chat window manned by an AI bot. For this reason, building chatbots is an effective way for new ecommerce businesses to get their foot through the door.

With a chat function on its website, a new online store can welcome its potential customers to a now-familiar setup wherein a chatbot greets them, shows them around the store, and helps them shop. Knowing that there’s a helpful AI-powered ecommerce chatbot just around the corner gives these potential customers the assurance that they have access to efficient service and a hassle-free shopping experience.

Providing your customers with valuable answers:

People like to buy from experts, be it at a brick-and-mortar store or at an ecommerce website. In order to assure your potential customers that they’re in good hands, you need to give them real and valuable information before they make a purchase. Visitors who have already found their way to your site probably have some idea of what they want to buy. All they need now is for someone to fill any information gaps that may be keeping them from making a purchase. An online ecommerce chatbot can easily be that someone, if you program it to give out information about your products and policies in a simple Q&A format.

Learning about your customers:

In order to give your potential customers the products, features and customer service they want, you need to know what they’re looking for when they arrive at your online store. By putting a chatbot to work, you can collect a host of useful clues about your customers’ needs and behavior. Your chat transcripts will show certain patterns or recurring elements that can help you figure out what’s missing from your store. For example, questions and complaints like the following can indicate that you need to add more search filters to your inventory:

“Which of these phones have the best user ratings?”

“I can’t find a way to search for products that can be delivered to my location.”

“How can I sort these items by color?”

“I’m only looking for leather bags.”

You can use these insights to improve your website’s search functionality, and the chat transcripts you collect later on will show you how your customers are responding to the new changes. Building ecommerce chatbots is a failsafe way to know what changes and upgrades you should prioritize in order to get the best feedback (and by extension, more business) from your customers.

Dealing with unexpected checkout issues:

All online stores list shopping cart abandonment as one of their main challenges. And more often than not, people abandon their carts because they didn’t have a small but significant piece of information to help them decide on their purchase. Sometimes, they’re just not sure that they’re getting the product at the best possible price. At other times, they could be unclear about the product’s specifications. Technical issues could also be an unfortunate trigger for shopping cart abandonment.

Whatever be the reason, an online ecommerce chatbot will help you identify and address it. Go over the transcripts of your chatbot’s conversations with visitors after they add products to their cart, and you may find interactions like the following:

Chatbot: “Hello! You seem to have items in your cart. If you need any assistance with your purchase, type your query or choose any of the options below: payment methods accepted; returns and refunds; view product details; browse similar products.”

Customer: “Browse similar products.”

Chatbot: “Based on your recent search, here are some more products you may be interested in. Click any product image to continue.”

Customer: “I want to buy a different product but I’m getting an error message while trying to remove items from my cart.”

If you come across interactions like the above on multiple occasions, you probably need to optimize your shopping cart for changes and additions. Once you get this done, you’re likely to see fewer instances of checkout issues.

Generating sales leads:

Despite your best efforts, not all potential customers will buy something the first time they visit your website. Some of them will always prefer to talk to a real human to get more information about your store and its policies. For such customers, you can create an ecommerce chatbot that acts as a virtual ‘receptionist’, greeting them and providing basic information which prompts them to submit their contact details. Leads generated in this manner can then be passed on to your sales team, who can then follow up with them and complete the sale over the phone or email.

Keep reading our blog posts for up-to-date information on ecommerce chatbot development. You can also contact us directly with your questions about building chatbots for your online shopping website.