With so many channels like social media, email, and apps around, online shopping doesn’t follow a single path. These multiple options can be befuddling to consumers if a single clear way of reaching a business is not available. Such a single way solution is provided by eCommerce chatbots, which are increasingly becoming one of the leading digital marketing trends.
Many businesses prefer using chatbots to converse with their customers in real-time to solve their issues on multiple platforms, like their e-store or Facebook. These bots use artificial intelligence (AI) to ascertain customers’ interests and develop a personalized shopping experience.
This blog provides you with detailed information on Ecommerce chatbots, purposes of using these, and some real-life examples of chatbot benefits from using these. So read on.
What is a chatbot?
Chatbots are computer programs that imitate human conversation to complete some service. E-commerce chatbots are designed to enable customers to buy your products directly from the chat from anywhere and anytime. So, these are designed for a variety of purposes, from handling customers to solving their queries.
Purpose of using E-commerce chatbots
As aforementioned, E-commerce chatbots are designed for different purposes. These include-
Reach out: E-commerce chatbots are engineered to help e-commerce businesses discover potential buyers across social media. Your prospects can find your products just with a message.
Explore: E-commerce chatbots are made to allow customers to go through your products and make inquiries about them using their own words.
Purchase: E-commerce chatbots are created to let customers find the right products. Their powerful filters and quick customer interaction ability help them to buy directly from the chat.
Share: With their built-in rich social sharing feature, e-commerce chatbots can help customers to share products and purchases to their circle.
Notify: E-commerce chatbots are also designed to update and notify customers about their offers, product recommendations, product deliveries, and delays.
Support: E-commerce chatbots can be designed to provide all the support that a business’s customers would need.
Some real-life examples of businesses benefitting from using E-commerce chatbots
Since the AI chatbots technology is relatively new, the above-given list of purposes might not be enough to help you understand how online sellers use these. So, here are some real-life examples of brands and businesses that are successfully using E-commerce chatbots.
Sephora
A French multinational beauty company known as Sephora has been using its chatbot on the bot platform Kik to offer makeup tips and product suggestions to users. It makes such offers based on their answers to personal quiz answers about their makeup routine. It also redirects users to Sephora’s website or app to make purchases.
The company also owns a Facebook bot known as Sephora Virtual Artist. It enables users to visualize Sephora’s products’ effect on themselves by applying the makeup on the user’s selfie. The firm also uses a booking bot called Sephora Reservation Assistant bot. It has helped it increase its booking rates by 11%.
SnapTravel
SnapTravel, a Canada based innovative travel company, employs a SnapTravel bot to send a Facebook message or SMS texting to book hotel rooms. The bot sends automated responses tailored to each customer. If the user types something beyond the bot’s comprehension, the conversation is automatically diverted to a human agent.
Each week, some 50,000 customer conversations occur. However, Snap Travel manages these effectively with a customer service team of 30 agents alone. The chatbot has helped the firm make over $1 million through hotel bookings in less than a year, reports SnapTravel.
Bot Burger
A simple E-commerce bot experiment was carried out in Paris between late 2016 and early 2017. It aimed at delivering burgers to people on Friday and Saturday nights between 9 pm and 5 am. Users could place orders for burgers straight through the messenger without visiting any website.
The Facebook Page associated with Bot Burger received an enormous, highly engaged audience, and hence acquired users perfectly. Users could start a conversation with Bot Burger directly from a Facebook post, a Facebook Ad, or shares from friends within the bot.
They could order burgers by clicking options and buttons in the app or through natural language conversations. They could also reorder quickly in a single tap to send their prior order to the same address. The E-commerce chatbot also allowed sellers to re-engage with customers at any time.
The results were amazing- 20% of Bot Burger’s customers made a second purchase in 14 days or even less.
Argomall
Argomall, an e-commerce store in the Philippines, launched an E-commerce chatbot to help users find important info about Argomall, make inquiries, and converse with an Argomall support agent. The bot was designed to help streamline the sales process and enhance support and live chat experience.
Argomall’s bot is also integrated with Google’s Site Search API. So, when users entered keywords related to products available at Argomall, they were shown relevant products from the platform.
The E-commerce bot increased the e-store’s ROI by 23 times within a few months of its launch and became a vital sales and customer service tool for the e-store.
HelloFresh
HelloFresh, a leading meal kit company, launched an E-commerce chatbot called Freddy to help its customer support and reduce wait times for consumers. For, the increased wait time is one of the e-Commerce marketing mistakes to be avoided.
The bot can automatically respond to a lot of customer queries. Besides offering customer support, Freddy also handles sections, including a reminder service, Spotify playlist recommendations, and news and blog content updates from HelloFresh.
The bot efficiently ensures a good customer experience and takes their engagement with the brand beyond mere buying. The eCommerce chatbot has decreased the average customer wait time by 38%, despite a 44% increase in conversations. When employed in a Black Friday promotion, the bot brought in five times more regular users than average.
Rounding it all up, eCommerce Chatbots bring a great opportunity for you to grow your business. As seen from the examples discussed in this post, also there are different types of chatbots that can help you drive more sales, manage customer support easily, and engage with and grow your customer base. So, draw some inspiration from these examples and look for ways to use E-commerce chatbots in your business to simplify it, enhance the experience, and increase ROI!
