10 Surprising Ways Chatbots Are Revolutionizing Ecommerce

From simply ordering food to booking appointments, hiring services, and or even making bids, customers use online shopping as a friendly, and efficient way to shop.

Establishing an online store as unique in its niche is essential for staying ahead of competitors. As the number of consumers increases on a daily basis, online stores have started deploying chatbots to engage customers. Here are 10 ways chatbots can be used to meet the needs of customers, and store owners, some of which may surprise you…

1. Gathering Customer Data

Chatbots are steadily becoming a major source for gathering data. They manage this because they gather far more customer data than any other form of analytics. Nuances in speech, response times, even typing accuracy can be mined as big data sets to understand users.

More importantly, rather that being generalized data, the information gathered is niche specific, and so far more valuable to a site’s owners.

2. Streamlined Store Management

Chatbots can be easily integrated within an online store which allows tasking of multiple operations from a single control point, be it a window or the dashboard. Rather than focusing on developing an application, stores can optimize their services since no application is required for users to gain access to facilities.

3. Greater Outreach

While mainstream marketing strategies provide a significant degree of success, chatbots bring an untapped potential for higher outreach on ecommerce stores. Through them, specific target groups can be catered uniquely, allowing each potential lead to be dealt according to their preferences.

Customers are not only more inclined to complete their purchases but are also willing to buy additional items recommended by chatbots.

4. Boosting Leads

Chatbots can be integrated into existing marketing strategies aimed at enhancing lead generation. They can be optimized with relevant responses depending on user choices, which guide them towards products and services either through manual search or interest.

If a chatbot detects a predefined pattern in customer navigation, it automatically sends related products and services offered by the seller or an affiliate to improve browsing. Moreover, it increases the chances that the customer will purchase additional items, leading to higher conversion rate.

Because the responses of chatbots can be programmed to be selective in nature depending on customer choices, data and behavior, it effectively reduces the chances of inadvertently spamming customers, yielding greater acceptance from the buyer.

5. Increasing Revenue Through Cross-Selling and Up-Selling

As the code is designed to review customer preferences and purchase history, chatbots can identify items which are related and recommend by shoppers. Often, customers are searching for complimentary products, and chatbots scale the analytics to suggest similar items.

While users keep browsing on various pages of the store, the data is being collected in the background for chatbots to assist leads into conversion.

6. Personalized Engagement

The AI behind chatbots is programmed to mimic human interaction and can respond to user behavior with the same information and pattern as a sales representative would. Because they have access to greater reserves of data, these tools can generate faster and more precise recommendations based on user profile. This allows chatbots to engage customers in real time on a personal level.

7. Managing Sales Services

Chatbots can handle complex customer queries, allowing them to become an integral part of sales and support. As an Interactive agent, chatbots function as an artificial conversational entity to initiate a textual or auditory dialogue with a customer who needs help regarding products and services.

By stimulating a human presence, customers are inclined to converse and get the information they need without any intermediate delay.

8. Reducing Human Resources

Chatbots not only augment the sales funnel but also help by sealing financial leakages to strengthen the revenue curve. While online stores are an ideal solution to unburden businesses from recruitment overheads, chatbots function by further reducing hiring cost by supplying all the abilities of many dedicated resources combined.

These tools can monitor store’s live interactions, queries, tracking, and analytics without the need of a single human resource.

However, this does not mean they are entirely self-sustaining modules. To ensure maximum performance is delivered, these tools require maintenance and testing on a periodic basis by qualified professionals.

9. Availability

Many online stores target global audiences located in different time zones. To ensure seamless user experiences, it is imperative for sales services to remain functional at all times; if a potential lead is unable to receive help and support during a query, it is more than likely that an abandonment will follow as a consequence.

Chatbots can function consistently by relaying information simultaneously, catering to all types and category of audiences. Deploying them for sales support guarantees your customers have a reliable channel for resolving queries at their disposal.

10. Gathering Customer Feedback

Customers are among the most valuable sources for gathering information when optimizing websites and its elements. In case the webpage is receiving traffic but is unable to convert leads, chatbots can be set to conduct surveys regarding what they seek in an online store to revise the store elements accordingly.

Chatbots and Ecommerce

As technology introduces new online solutions to customers and merchants, ecommerce stores have transitioned from static shopping platforms into evolved machines that not only enhance their business but also provide an improved user experience for customers.

Auto-interaction tools such as Chatbots provide an excellent list of compelling features that can be integrated into online stores to passively modify store management and ultimately win the increased revenues every online store hopes to achieve.

Paul Simons

Paul Simons is a professional eCommerce and a digital marketing expert. He is currently working for FME Addons, a company that develops extensions for popular shopping carts like Magento, WordPress and Woocommerce.