Digging into Shopify’s ‘Chatbot’ Apps

Yay or Nay?

Shopify is, arguably, the easiest platform to get an online store up and running. It’s certainly the most popular, with over 600,000 active stores. It’s intuitive, easy to use, has beautiful UI.

And now, they also have chatbots.

Chatbots on the Shopify app store

The Shopify app store is one of the key reasons they are doing so well.

Whatever your business does, you will find an app to help you — from design to marketing and sales.

It’s no surprise you will now also find chatbot apps in there.

I’ve just searched through their app store now and could find 21 chatbot results. Not bad.

The pros and cons of Shopify’s chatbot apps

Let’s cover a few of the pros and cons of using what I like to call an ‘out-of-the-box’ chatbot from their app store.

Pros

• Easy to setup — you can pick any of the 21 results and activate it in under 10min. Can’t make it much easier than this.
• (Mostly) free — 14 out of the 21 results are free. You can give them a try and remove them without much hassle if they don’t perform. The other 7 solutions are also relatively cheap.
• Not much planning required — one of the tricky aspects of implementing chatbots (and AI in general) is planning. It takes time to make a proper plan of what you want your solution to do. With these, you’re pretty much instantly good to go.

Cons

• Not custom — anything that’s out-of-the-box needs to suit a vast majority of users. This means the chatbot solutions you find in the Shopify app store are not optimised to your specific requirements — duh.
• Not owned — you are at the mercy of the developers behind these apps. If they take it down, change privacy settings, or whatever, you suffer the consequences.
• Not really a chatbot — it’s a hard pill to swallow, but unfortunately true. Most of these ‘chatbots’ are flow-based with very little artificial intelligence.

Are they worth it?

Even though I work at a high-end conversational software (aka chatbots) building company, I’ve always been a fan of out-of-the-box solutions.

There is a reason for this.

Templated chatbots like the ones you’ll find on the Shopify app store are amazing for trial runs.

I always encourage anyone looking into chatbots to play around with free, DIY options first. Though they’re not ideal (and I certainly wouldn’t encourage to have one running long term, especially with real company data), these options can give you the beginning of an understanding of how it all works, where you think a chatbot could benefit your business and more.

The best use case for an out-of-the-box Shopify chatbot

Based on the above, I’m sure you can figure out what I believe to be the best course of action with these templated chatbots.

Step 1: find out what you’d like to achieve with a chatbot.

With ecommerce and Shopify specifically in mind, this is a very important question. I go through this process in more detail in this post.

> Shopify Chatbots: A Guide to Scaling Online Sales

Step 2: search and activate a templated chatbot from Shopify’s app store.

Do it. Play with the solution. Give it a couple of weeks and write down where it falls short.

Important: be data wary. Read pt.6 in this post.

Step 3: found a cool use case? Go custom.

Your business is at stakes. You want to make sure your chatbot solution suits your exact needs.

Have you implemented a chatbot in your Shopify store? Share your experience below! ⬇️