Chatbots for Shopify Stores and E-commerce

published by arjun on 1 year ago
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Chatbots for Shopify have been seen increasing in demand because of their functionality and ease that can make any support agents of the company into a sales force!

Shopify merchants have started using them vastly since the new integration with the platform is introduced. Since the popularity of large language models like ChatGPT, Shopify merchants can see the potential applications of integrating technologies like Shopify chatbots to help improve their overall customer experience.

Shopify chatbots are especially necessary when there’s an increasing need to find ways to elevate website efficiency and flexibility through fast communication while cutting costs in the process.

Before recommending our top Shopify chatbot integrations, let’s understand what Shopify chatbots are and their applications in this age before implementing them.

What is a Shopify Chatbot?

In simple terms, the Shopify chatbot is a program designed to simulate human interaction through text messages. Chatbots offer a native integration towards all user platforms, such as mobile, PC, and web platforms like Shopify stores.

Chatbots can work under various technologies, especially natural language processing, rule-based systems, and machine learning.

Chatbots generally serve customers through FAQs, query satisfaction, and repetitive tasks that usually consume a lot of time and effort if done otherwise. Such services can be done very seamlessly through simple automation techniques.

Although this setup firmly depends on technological advancements, the answers provided by the automated system must seem human-like. This transaction between humans and chatbots has a vast potential to improve in the near future with tools such as ChatGPT challenging general intelligence every coming day.

A tool like the Shopify chatbot can have the ability to transform the global e-commerce market in the coming years as the back-end programming will be migrated effectively behind the website.

Why Use a Chatbot for Shopify?

Does any of the reasons below sound familiar to you?

✓ You need a quick chatbot widget on your Shopify store to answer customers’ frequently asked questions.

✓ You need to support the customer service team to automate all the repetitive tasks, from answering questions and tracking orders to updating customers and taking appointments.

If the above reasons are familiar to your requirements, you should consider a simple chatbot integration as an advanced interactive panel for all your preferred needs.

Using the Shopify chatbot on your website can also help users offer current information on the go as an all-in-one knowledge hub rather than a long list of frequently asked questions that visitors have to go through each of them.

Your customers can ask questions in the Shopify chatbot naturally, and the bot recognizes the keywords used in the box to reply with an automated message as an answer.

Now, Shopify merchants may need to take time to train the chatbot to ensure the automated system is serving its purpose rightfully by giving appropriate replies. Although such tasks are taken care of by the tech providers and their customer care force.

Shopify Chatbot – Pros and Cons

Every technology has its own downsides to be considered when using it. Same with the chatbot, the accuracy of the Shopify chatbot technology solely depends on the quality of data fed to the system. The poor the quality, the cheaper the product gets, and thus, not so a pleasant experience.

Choosing the right chatbot technology provider is as important as training the technology. That’s why merchants should always ensure the provider isn’t based on just ‘If this, then do this’ statements without considering the possible scenarios and utilizing language processors to make the conversation human-like.

For instance, if a user wants to change their delivery address, he can ask the chatbot in various different manners, such as:

  1. I want to change the delivery address.
  2. How can I change the delivery address?
  3. I want the product to be delivered somewhere else.
  4. Can you please change the address of delivery?
  5. My product [product name] needs to be delivered to the new address: [new address]

Your chatbot should understand these variations pointing out one single answer and delivering it to that customer without sounding robotic.

Be Straightforward with Chatbots

Apart from the technological challenges, it’s also crucial to integrate the Shopify chatbot properly on your website. Bot displacement was a big issue back in the day when the bot couldn’t respond to customers or give wrong answers. The customers used to get very frustrated.

When the word came out to customer service, the brand was already halfway to losing its quality.

The lesson to conclude here is not to let people be tricked into thinking they’re speaking to a real human being. When the users understand they’re talking to a chatbot, they know what to expect from the system and interact accordingly.

Being simple and straightforward about the technology is how it’s needed to be. Therefore, it gets easy and meaningful to get the job done with many possibilities to cover at the end of the day.

Recommended Chatbots for your Shopify Store

Here are some of the recommended Shopify chatbot providers we’ve used and would like to integrate into our stores for a better customer experience.

Gorgias

Gorgias is an online chatbot platform to provide store merchants with tools to automate their customer support and sales process. It uses artificial intelligence and neural processing to understand and respond naturally to customers.

The potential reasons to integrate Gorgias into your Shopify store are to improve customer support and increase sales with multi-channel support and scalability, making it a valuable e-commerce tool.

Here are the benefits in detail:

  • Improved Customer Support: Gorgias chatbot can help merchants improve their customer support through frequently asked questions and providing an instant help desk.
  • Increased Sales: Gorgias chatbot for Shopify can also help increase sales through customized customer recommendations based on their product browsing history/purchase history.
  • Multi-Channel Support: It provides multi-channel support for customers across all the channels such as web, email, social media, live chat, and SMS.
  • Scalability: Gorgias is one of the dominating platforms for Shopify chatbot because of its high possibilities to scale the business.

FEATURES

PRICING

✓ Customer intent detection.

✓ User tracking.

✓ Chat history view mode.

✓ 30+ integrations.

✓ Bug block.

$60/mo as Basic

$300/mo for Professionals

$750/mo as Advanced

On-demand as Custom

Chatra

Chatra has a clean, sleek user interface with easy-to-use features, including live chat. Chatra is keen on keeping your users connected to your helpdesk 24/7 for an improved customer experience. The online and offline bots provided by Chatra helps users have a pleasant experience while using it.

Chatra also helps store merchants automate all the repetitive tasks for their e-commerce process. Like Gorgias, Chatra helps merchants increase sales and improve customer experience with multi-channel support.

Analytics and Reporting is provided to help track your chatbot’s performance to optimize your e-commerce sales process.

FEATURES

PRICING

✓ Online & Offline Bots

✓ Timely notifications

✓ Contact form

✓ Targated messages

✓ Facebook & Instagram Integration

Forever-free plan

$22/mo as Essential

$27/mo for Professionals

HeyDay – HootSuite

HeyDay, offered by HootSuite, is an AI-powered conversational platform to tackle mid-market and retail enterprises. Virtual shopping tools are also offered by HootSuite with live chatting and video consulting.

Along with Shopify, HeyDay HootSuite provides an NLP-based chatbot for the top social media platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp.

FEATURES

PRICING

✓ NLP-Based Chatbots

✓ Bot-to-Human Selection

✓ AI product search

✓ Automated order tracking

✓ Analytics support

$49/mo as Standard

$1k/mo and above for Enterprise

Relish AI

Why Relish AI? Because it provides various AI templates on Shopify for product cross-selling & upscaling. Relish is a shopping assistant designed to automate customer support, sales, conversion rates, product discovery assistance, and Shopify abandoned cart recovery.

FEATURES

PRICING

Offers FAQs

Newsletter signup

Order tracking

AI conversational campaigns

Cross-selling and product upscaling templates

$29/mo as Standard

$69/mo for Professionals

$199/mo as Premium

On-demand plan for Business

Formilla

Formilla provides Shopify Chatbot, live chat, market automation with real-time visitor monitoring tools along with the multichannel dashboard and contact management.

Formilla is an advanced Shopify chatbot solution for merchants rather than a simple chatting widget on your website.

FEATURES

PRICING

Menu-based chatbots

Welcome messages

NLP-based chatbots

Zapier, Mailchimp, Pipedrive, and Zendesk Integration

$15/mo for Premium

$25/mo for Professional

$35/mo for Growth

Top Customer Service Strategies Using Shopify Chatbots

Putting a chatbot widget on your website is not the answer to customer growth and retention. Using the right chatbot with applied strategies can take you miles toward growth and profits.

Here at ValarDigital, we suggest considering chatbots as a long-term strategy to help understand your goals and hitpoints of customers.

Helping your customer service team with ease of work while improving the overall customer experience is the main moto of this process. If you need a good customer growth strategy, do not hesitate to get in touch with our team.

We’re happy to help!