Ecommerce Chatbots: Improve Sales And Retention

Updated on October 25, 2023

If you’ve always been interested in the technology world and you’ve been around long enough. You’ll remember how odd and gimmicky chatbots used to be. Ecommerce chatbots have often been presented as eye-catching contenders with the potential to beat the Turing test.

Even though they were essentially limited to:

Asking vague questions
Giving vague answers
Adopting a clumsy tone of surrealism to cloak the fundamental lack of understanding.

It’s fascinating to look back on those times now in light of how dramatically things have changed since then.

No longer gimmicks
Chatbots have become staples of the online world,
Used not for entertainment or prototyping but to improve sales and support systems.

These days people know what chatbots can and can’t practically do.

I mentioned sales and support systems, so there’s obvious relevance in the e-commerce field.

The proof is in how widely sellers have implemented chatbot technology. Effective use of ecommerce chatbots can lead to increased sales and greater customer retention.

What is an ecommerce chatbot?

A chatbot is a software application that is capable of stimulating human-like conversations. The latest technology and artificial intelligence back it up, which is why it can answer tough questions in innovative and personalized ways. The best part about a chatbot is its 24/7 availability which makes customers satisfied.

Ecommerce chatbots are specially designed to cater to ecommerce websites. It is very beneficial for all ecommerce websites as when customers come to their website, it can provide them with a satisfactory experience.

There are a lot of advantages of ecommerce chatbots other than just good services. This includes-

Personalized experience
Better product suggestion based on profile
Low cart abandonment rate
Increased ROI
Saves time for the employees

How Ecommerce Chatbots Improve Sales And Retention

1. Ecommerce chatbots extend sales opportunities to social platforms

The internet is a big place, so it’s tough for specific retailers to get noticed. So it would help if you did everything to expand your sales funnels and hoover in as many leads and conversions as possible.

The more sources they can bring to bear, and the more effectively they can handle them, the better metrics they can ultimately secure.

You can turn to content marketing to ensure people looking for expert advice or product suggestions, certainly. You can use paid ads to drive clicks reliably.

But what’s your distribution method?

Instead of just using traditional channels such as search engines. You can turn to the incredible popularity of social media platforms.

Social audiences are vast and actionable, potentially making them incredibly lucrative.

When you’re tweaking your sales strategy to factor in social media, chatbots can help.

The real key to a successful ecommerce business is being aware of these trends and always adapting to them. Chatbots can be deployed on social media platforms to drive sales. By interacting with shoppers or allowing them to buy directly through channels such as Facebook Messenger or Pinterest).

It’s a time of multi-channel e-commerce — having an adapted version of each facet of the sales process for each viable channel. But the ultimate goal is omnichannel e-commerce (having just one seamless cross-channel buyer experience).

An ecommerce chatbot is perfect because it can be deployed across many channels while drawing from the same database. That makes this technology essential to moving online retail ahead.

Suggested read: How to integrate chatbot with facebook.

2. They provide useful engagement on a 24/7 basis

This is a time of international retail and flexible working. So it’s hardly rare for someone to decide they want to buy something in the early hours of the morning.

Factor in the presence of mobile devices that can tempt even those with regular sleeping patterns, and you have a recipe for 24/7 retail from national and international shoppers.

For example

Have you ever woken up in the middle of the night? Found yourself unable to get back to sleep and decided to do some online shopping as a distraction? I know I’ve done it many times.

Disposable income plus incredible convenience equals impulse buying.

Before you know it, your alarm goes off, and you suddenly remember buying a huge shipment of your favorite dessert — all because you could manage it with a half-working sleep-addled mind.

What happens, though, when a shopper reaches an online store at such a time and has a question to ask?

No support assistants will be available because it’s outside regular working hours, so there might be no support.

This can be frustrating: perhaps only mildly for the shopper who wasn’t that invested in making a purchase, but massively for the store brand because it could have made a purchase but managed to miss out.

Chatbots, though, don’t need to sleep or take breaks.

They can be left to run all day and every day with zero degradation or complaints about exhaustion.

You don’t need to pay them extra to work overtime.

What’s more, while they can’t keep shoppers hooked with the entertaining conversation?

Ecommerce chatbots can be consistently useful and make dynamic recommendations or provide order updates.

This helps to pick up sales throughout the day.

3. They ensure incredible consistency of presentation

I noted that chatbots couldn’t be too conversational.

Even with today’s NLP and techniques to make them seem more human, they’re incapable of convincingly mimicking human speech.

But they can provide incredible consistency in aesthetics and functionality — two things that make a huge difference to user experience.

For instance, a business can brand the design of its e-commerce chatbot to distribute those brand elements widely.

It can adjust the color schemes of the windows, the language used (how formal or informal it is, how it presents and describes products), and how visuals are deployed.

Product recommendations

When a real support assistant recommends a product, they might forget to mention a certain feature.

There is no chance of a chatbot making that mistake.

Product recommendation by Ecommerce chatbot

When a customer wants to know something, in particular, they’ll know whether they can get it from a store’s chatbot.

Because it will have been listed very clearly in the array of functions (usually displayed at the first opening and subsequently made available through some kind of help button in the chatbot window).

Bonus read: How to automate your customer support using chatbots

Faster response

Think about how different that is from dealing with support assistants, particularly for big businesses with many employees.

Have you ever used a huge company’s support service?

Ever become intensely frustrated by having your support ticket passed among numerous people who don’t seem to share information properly?

You call up, log an issue, and await a thorough reply.

When it comes, it’s from a different person who must confirm all the details with you — and when you’re done talking, they pass the issue to yet another person who must repeat the process.

Soon enough, you start getting angry with the assistants, even though they’re not individually to blame for the process.

Chatbots aren’t just consistent: they ensure incredible continuity of service, with every case tracked carefully and every chatbot instance able to immediately access all the necessary details through user logins or unique ticket identifiers.

The former can provide fast support without paying real assistants, and the latter get their questions answered.

Whenever they need help, all without having to address real people. This is fantastic for merchants and shoppers.

4. Ecommerce bots can accommodate enormous numbers of visitors

Any given support assistant can only deal with so many queries at once, and each one will reduce the speed of their responses and affect the quality of their support.

Even if someone can type quickly and multi-task like a top-level pro, they can’t manage several complex conversational exchanges without making mistakes that can prove extremely embarrassing for the brand they represent (mistakes like getting names confused).

Imagine if you could create an exact copy of that support assistant for every shopper, ensuring undivided attention. You can’t, obviously (even if you could, it would be ethically questionable), but you can do something very similar by using chatbots.

After all, multi-tasking isn’t a concern for chatbots backed by extensive cloud-processing resources.

Such chatbots are capable of doing far more than just working on a 24/7 basis. They are also efficient in handling huge workloads.

Each instance is separate, serving as that exact copy we talked about: another execution of the same program but with a blank slate and zero resource overlap.

Set up a chatbot with the right cloud computing plan and it can scale neatly to accommodate the number of people using your site, drawing more processing power when needed and asking for less when it isn’t.

This is ultimately an efficient way to deal with intense retail periods such as public holidays.

Moreover, they don’t mess up, no matter how much traffic you throw at them. The worst-case scenario is that the demand surpasses the supply you’re paying for, and things start to slow down.

There still won’t be any mistakes, such as no confusing names, no typos stemming from trying to type too quickly, and no requests misinterpreted as a result of overwork.

How to improve sales and retention with e-commerce chatbots

Here is how you can improve sales and customer retention with e-commerce chatbots –

1. Collect information about your customers

You can use your chatbots to collect important information about your customers that can be used to improve your sales and customer retention. It would help if you programmed your chatbot in a way that it can pick up the essential data that can be used for the benefit of your business. This way, your chatbot can act as a database management system that will help you give important insights regarding the customer that can benefit you with sales and customer retention.

2. Personalize the experience

You should offer products, services and content to the customer specific to their needs. This will save up their time and also helps them focus on what is essential for them. It is an excellent way of improving your customer retention rate and sales. By being specific to the customers’ needs, you are saving up your and the customer’s energy and time investment.

3. Make your chatbot multilingual

There are numerous languages in the world. If you ask a customer, their first choice for the conversation medium will always be their native language. Having a chatbot that can have conversations in different languages with the customer is always an advantage. It is one of the ways of offering a personal touch to the customer. Many customers purchase your products and services because of the ease of understanding.

4. Break down the process of purchasing

No matter how good your product or service is, it is essential to have a user-friendly website and application. If your customer cannot determine how to purchase a product or service from your website, then all your services are useless. The process of purchase should be easy to understand. This will also help you in making a customer come back for a second purchase.

The best ecommerce chatbot available

There are a lot of ecommerce chatbots in the market but selecting the right one for yourself is very important. Here is a list of the most popular ecommerce chatbots-

1. Kommunicate

Chat bots from Kommunicate are an excellent choice if you’re looking for an intelligent chatbot that gives you benefits like personalized responses, frequent reverting, and Natural Language Processing. Kommunicate offers one of the best chatbot building facilities in the market at a very reasonable price.

2. Giosg

Giosg can use smart tools to solve all the problems related to chatbots in your organization. It is your one-stop solution for seamless customer communication, 24/7 availability, and personalized responses.

3. MobileMonkey

It is a trendy name in the chatbot market and offers omnichannel integration. MobileMonkey incorporates intriguing features like the use of GIFs and animation to enhance the realness of the conversation.

4. Chatfuel

Chatfuel is a straightforward yet powerful platform for building chatbots or ecommerce websites. If you have just started off your business and are looking for a chatbot that offers you all the services and yet is simple in its approach, then Chatfuel is the one for you.

How to choose the right ecommerce chatbot for your business

While selecting the right ecommerce chatbot for yourself, you must first understand your problem. If your organisation is suffering from the problem of frequently reverting to your customers, then getting a chat board that offers 24/7 availability will be the best for you.

Further, if you are looking for a chatbot that can give more natural responses that are also emotionally intelligent, then you will need to get an e-commerce dart board which is highly developed in NLP.

Here are the things that you must keep in mind while selecting an ecommerce bot for yourself-

Customer targeting features
A/B Testing options
Integration facilities
Analytics tracking feature
Pre-made templates

Wrapping up

This is a solid list of reasons why e-commerce chatbots are so effective in driving sales and customer retention, but it isn’t exhaustive.

In summary, provided you can create high-quality scripts and back them with the necessary resources, there’s no good reason not to use e-commerce chatbots.

So if you’re not using them for your online retail brand, now is the perfect time to change that.

At Kommunicate, we are envisioning a world-beating customer support solution to empower the new era of customer support. We would love to have you on board to have a first-hand experience of Kommunicate. You can signup here and start delighting your customers right away.