Chatbot for Ecommerce: Boost Your Online Sales With The Help of A Chatbot
A chatbot can benefit the biggest or the smallest eCommerce company. Whether you’re selling clothes, shoes, makeup, electronics, art & crafts, or furniture, having a chatbot is a great investment for your store.
Big brands benefit from chatbots because it allows them to engage with numerous customers in a timely and efficient manner. At the same time, small stores that cannot hire several employees can compete with bigger businesses by providing immediate service.
Aside from benefitting on the customer service aspect, you might be wondering:
How can chatbots help boost my online sales?
Having a chatbot can help increase your revenue because it solves different customer problems that often lead to cart abandonment. A Sales Cycle report found that worldwide cart abandonment in 2018 was as high as 75%. By addressing these customer problems, you could recover 20–30% of these abandoned carts. Here are some customer problems that your chatbot can address.
When a customer visits your site to find a product, the last thing you want them to do is click the back button because they are having a hard time to locate what they are looking for. It’s like having a sure sale that just went poof! Even if you have an amazing site navigation, this does not guarantee that your customers will always know where to look.
A chatbot can help your customer instantly find what they need, filter out results, and sort out products based on their preferences. You can also use this as an opportunity to push your featured products, offer discounts, and upsell to the customer. Having a chatbot assist customers in product discovery not only saves time, but it also improves the customer experience.
Here’s a secret: The faster your customer gets to the checkout page, the fewer chances they’ll get to changing their minds or abandoning the purchase altogether. Many customers typically complain that the reason they abandon their carts is that they have to go through so many hoops and obstacles just to buy a product.
If they find the process too complex or too tedious, you’ll lose them. A chatbot can guide the customers to make the checkout process much simpler. Because AI chatbots are more interactive, customers are more engaged and the chances of them getting away are lowered.
Let’s face it. Modern customers can be very demanding. When they need information, they want it right now. As in right this second. If you don’t give them an instant response, then they’re going to switch to your competitor who was able to give them the answer they need. But the reality is, being online 24/7 is not a possibility especially if you’re just a solo eCommerce entrepreneur. Still, that should not be a reason why you should keep losing sales.
Having a chatbot will allow you to give customers instant responses on common concerns during checkout such as information about sizes, color availability, shipping fees, warranty, return policies, delivery times, and applicable taxes. The capability to instantly satisfy customer concerns will certainly help push more sales.
Another reason why customers abandon their carts is that they’re still shopping around and comparing products. While they are actively wanting to buy something, this does not mean that you are their only option.
Sure, you can send a cart abandonment email but do you know that sending cart abandonment reminders via Facebook Messenger has an open rate of 80% compared to the 20% open rate of emails? There are many free chatbot tools that you can already integrate on your Facebook Messenger. You just have to make sure that you capture the customer’s messenger details by adding a plug-in on your checkout page.
When the customer accepts to receive updates on Messenger, it will be easier for you to contact them even after they leave your website.
You can send a reminder after an hour of the cart being abandoned. If you’re unsuccessful, you can send another reminder after 24–48 hours by offering a discount on the product or similar products.
The Chatbot Advantage in Ecommerce
In the eCommerce industry, customer experience is one of the most important aspects that will help your business become a success. Because you do not have the opportunity to interact and engage with your customers face-to-face, you have to ensure that you’re still building a positive and profitable relationship with them.
Using chatbots to enhance your eCommerce store’s customer experience is a cost-efficient and convenient solution that can help you sell more and earn more.
Originally published at https://masterofcode.com on August 5, 2020.