E-Commerce in Chatbots: Why You Should Hire Chatbot Developers Now

From 24/7 customer service to personalized recommendations, modern consumers expect a lot from businesses today. Thanks to the everyday emerging technology, they can be served better than before. Amongst all, a technology trend that has played the most significant role in meeting the continuous demand of users is chatbots. In 2022, almost 88% of customers have interacted with at least one chatbot. And 74% of brands were also satisfied after integrating a bot in their websites. These chatbots offer great value to businesses who are looking to take their customer service to another level, without spending too much money. But what are the insights of e-commerce chatbots? And should you hire a chatbot developer? Let’s find out. 

What are E-commerce Chatbots?

E-commerce chatbots are integrated within e-commerce websites to improve the customer’s shopping experience. Developers program them to engage in conversation with users in a human-like language, making them a significant part of the customer service department.

Chatbots are of two types: rule-based and AI chatbots. Rule-based chatbots can be pre-programmed based on your business’s rules and you can also design conversation flows based on these rules. Like, answering product queries or frequently asked questions. 

With the growing role of AI in e-commerce development, AI-powered chatbots leverage machine learning technology to give better output based on the previous chat/purchase history of customers.

Like if a customer wants to know his order status, or which products are out of stock, AI chatbots work best to serve this purpose. Statistics on chatbot trends and behavior: 

• -70% of users consider chatbots to be useful 
• -39% of all chats between businesses and consumers now involve a chatbot
• -People preferred to use chatbots between 8 am and 5 pm
• -From 2022 to 2023, the number of buyers who showed gratitude through chatbots were doubled

Why Should You Consider Investing In E-commerce Chatbots?

Benefits of E-commerce chatbots are a lot too many, however, here is a list of a few: 

1. To Give A Seamless Customer Experience: If not chatbots, you will have to hire a good number of customer service agents to handle the traffic incoming. Customers raise a high volume of tickets if their concerns go unnoticed. Even when you don’t receive a high volume of queries, the nature of requests can put stress on your support teams. This may lead to more mistakes, misleading information, and missed tickets. With chatbots deployed in place, the case is not the same anymore. It automates a significant part of your operations, leaving your staff to manage more complex tasks that might need a human mind. That is why, by the year 2030, the global chatbot market is expected to reach $27.3 bn. 
2. To Gather More Customer Insights: In any business, knowing your customer and his preferences is the key to refining your processes and staying ahead of the competitors. Using chatbots, you can collect more data about your customers, like their feedback, demographics, browsing patterns, and purchasing patterns. Even though your customer service team of humans can handle this task, results are usually inconsistent. An automated chatbot, developed by a custom mobile app development company, can manage this efficiently. 
3. Automate The Sales Process: Efficiency sustained in the long run is the key for any business, and automation plays a crucial role. Instead of having humans give product recommendations or expecting customers to find a way out themselves, you can deploy a chatbot to automate the sales process. Developers can program these chatbots to analyze customer behavior or study their past purchase patterns. So, whenever customers add a product to their cart, the chatbot suggests products or upgrades. This way, chatbots can act as virtual sales assistants and influence purchase decisions. Using e-commerce chatbots, you can guide your customers throughout the customer journey, right from finding products to offering them a better checkout experience. 
4. Expand Sales Channels: Your reach should not be limited to a single channel. Instead, you must develop your brand’s presence wherever your customers are present. Like if a customer lands on your Instagram page, there’s an opportunity to interact with them. So integrating a chatbot into Instagram will help you provide information about your services, then and there. 
5. Collect More Reviews: Gathering customer reviews manually is a tiresome process, and it often leads to wasted time and effort. So by automating this process, you ensure you convert every purchase order into an authentic review from customers. The chatbots can be programmed to ask for reviews automatically across your website and social media handles. This way, you can gather a lot of genuine customer reviews, and later display them on your website to boost trust and reliability.
6. Reduce Abandoned Cart Rates: According to a few researches, 70% of shoppers abandon their carts and the reasons behind this are:

• -High shipping costs, tax 
• -Requiring the customer to create an account 
• -The estimated delivery time was high 

Abandoned carts lead to a loss in revenue, but you can solve this problem using a chatbot. So whenever a customer tries to leave something in the cart, a chatbot can pop up right in front of them asking what’s stopping them from the purchase. This way, you can address issues in real-time and reduce cart abandonment rates. 

Use Cases of Chatbots in E-commerce

1. Product Suggestions: Customers are willing to know more about your offerings. However, providing an entire list makes it hard for them to go through. And they might find it overwhelming to scroll through the entire catalog. one way to address this issue is to add a section on your website that offers product recommendations. Based on your customers’ query, the bot can provide them with a list of products, and you can also tailor the recommendations based on aspects like “star products”, “most searched products” etc. With AI-powered chatbots, you can even offer 90% accurate suggestions. A health consultation company may ask questions about your primary health concerns to guide you with personalized recommendations.
2. Post-Sales Service: An ideal business is one that takes care of its customers even after the sale is done. And to provide the after-sales service, what’s better than using a chatbot? You can pre-program the e-commerce chatbots to offer facilities like order tracking, return tracking, refund status, warranty information, or reporting damaged products. When the support team addresses the customer’s queries immediately, the number of tickets raised decreases.
3. FAQs Chatbots: It happens very often that your support teams face the same set of questions frequently. To resolve that, you can use chatbots to list the frequently asked questions with answers for each. You can also include an option to talk to a customer support agent if that’s what they would want to go with. 
4. Feedback Collection: Automating the feedback collection task is a great way to save some time for your employees and get honest feedback about your products. The reviews also act as social proof to support your marketing efforts. For example, you can simply use WhatsApp automation to get in touch with your customers. You may send a link directly to their WhatsApp numbers to encourage them to fill out the feedback form. In some cases, you can even offer a discount to motivate them further. 
5. Omnichannel Sales: Today’s customers are present on all available platforms. So there is an opportunity to target them from everywhere. For example, social media apps like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, or Telegram. A dedicated chatbot developer may help you in building an e-commerce chatbot to reach them on every channel. You can give them personalized offers, product catalogs, or even feedback forms.

Hire Chatbot Developers Now

No matter what size business you are operating, you are likely juggling a hundred tasks, from inventory to customer service. Deploying chatbots is an excellent approach to reduce costs, enhance retention rates, improve operational efficiency, and increase ROI. However, you can’t deploy a chatbot on your own. If you need to develop an e-commerce chatbot, you can hire a Flutter app development company. A trusted company like ours can help you craft the best strategy for a customized bot. Contact us to discuss more!