How Botsheets Makes Conversational Commerce Easy
3 new ways to drive transactions on any ecommerce platform or natively inside of Messenger.
With Black Friday just days away, Christmas shopping right after that, and support for Instagram chatbots just weeks away, there is good reason to be excited about conversational commerce.
It’s not just about what’s coming up on the calendar that’s fueling the conversational commerce opportunity. It’s not just because a global pandemic has accelerated ecommerce adoption through a drastic shift in consumer behavior.
You need to deliver dynamic content to make ecommerce discovery through Messenger work well and Botsheets now makes dynamic content easier than ever through a major advancement — Botsheets Actions.
If you’ve built with Botsheets before, using external requests can be overwhelming, at times confusing. Botsheets Actions are built right into the Manychat Flow builder which now makes building dynamic conversational experiences super easy.
There are no confusing URL’s to set up, it's easier to translate into different languages, and your time-to-value from Botsheets is much faster. We’ll continue to support the existing URL external requests, but look at how easy it is to build with Botsheets now. You just fill out a form.
There are a few things we also learned over the last several months which lead us to release not just an updated ecommerce toolkit, but 3 separate toolkits:
Releasing 3 toolkits solve a few key challenges:
1. Setup time: We previously only had one ecommerce toolkit and you had to follow a number of steps just to see it work. The more steps to get it working, the greater the chance things can go wrong in your setup. We released an Ecommerce Lite
toolkit that sets up in 5 minutes so you can see it working immediately. Ecommerce CX
takes a little longer to set up with deeper functionality, and Ecommerce Native
, an update to our original toolkit takes the longest.
2. Different Sellers: We previously only had one toolkit to sell directly through Messenger, but we saw value in a conversational experience to drive discovery and transactions on any platform including, but not limited to, Amazon, Shopify, WooCommerce, even Etsy!
3. Best of both worlds: The best part of the native ecommerce experience we created was a shopping cart, but if you’re selling on other platforms you don’t need a shopping cart natively in Messenger. We think Ecommerce CX
is a perfect balance, enabling users to build and manage a list of favorite products, while you’ll drive the transaction on an ecommerce platform outside of Messenger. The CX stands for Customer Experience, and this toolkit really helps drive engagement around your products, while enabling you to target landing pages to drive transactions.
Which Toolkit is Right for Me?
Let me explain the main value proposition for each toolkit:
ECOMMERCE LITE
This is conversational commerce for beginners/everyone with minimal setup time. Enable users to browse and search for products and target landing pages (Amazon, Shopify, WooCommerce, etc.) to drive transactions. Users can even search for similar products creating an endless loop of product discovery in Messenger.
ECOMMERCE CX
Everything in the Ecommerce Lite toolkit but with a deeper customer experience (CX). Users can add items they like to a “Favorites” list. They may not be ready to buy, but you can re-engage them with specific products they like. All that market intelligence can help plan your sales pipeline with “favorites data” saved to a Google Sheet.
ECOMMERCE NATIVE
Building upon our existing ecommerce toolkit, it’s a complete transactional shopping experience natively in Messenger. Users can browse and search your products, add items to a shopping cart, provide shipping information, and your bot will calculate everything including taxes, shipping, and discounts. Collect payment in Messenger and write orders to a Google Sheet.
Next Steps
If you’re already building an ecommerce bot with Botsheets and it’s working for you, then not to worry, nothing changes. Moving forward, if you’re looking to build a new ecommerce bot or just want to learn from these new toolkits and start benefiting from Botsheets Actions built right into Manychat’s Flow Builder, grab one of our new ecommerce toolkits.
If you want to learn more about how they work, or want to learn how to connect Dialogflow and turn questions into commerce, click here and subscribe to our ecommerce sessions. We’ll send you a notification when there is video content on this topic.
If you have questions too, you can find us in the Botsheets Community!