AI chatbots are more than just a fad—they're an increasingly important e-commerce tool that improve customer service and streamline operations. Studies indicate that implementing chatbots can help cut e-commerce support costs by 30% while boosting revenue by 7-25%.
In this Chatling guide, we will review the top seven AI chatbots that can help e-commerce businesses offer round-the-clock support.
What Is an AI Chatbot for E-Commerce?
AI chatbots are automated software programs that are powered by rules, natural language processing (NLP), and AI technologies. Customers input requests or questions, and the chatbot generates or delivers an accurate, relevant response (without human intervention).
AI chatbots for e-commerce can automate several customer service tasks, including:
- Product searches & recommendations
- Order tracking
- Delivery updates
- Policy clarifications & FAQs
- Refunds and returns
They're programmed to "understand" customer requests and respond with accurate answers based on their training data. For example, Chatling lets e-commerce businesses connect a range of data sources—websites, documents, sitemaps, etc.—to an AI chatbot, so it can quickly generate the right answers.
This gives customers a powerful self-service option for their inquiries—making it easier for them to find what they need and complete their purchases.
Benefits of Using AI Chatbot for E-Commerce
Solving Customer Problems
AI chatbots for e-commerce can greatly facilitate businesses by handling customer queries and complaints 24/7. This is one of the most important and common e-commerce chatbot use cases.
It can directly converse with customers for support in case of grievances or feedback that needs instant handling, irrespective of the time and location. Additionally, offering 24-hour support is a great way to ensure customer satisfaction—35% of customers prefer to chat with a bot than a human.
Seamless Checkouts
Chatbots aren’t just for support—they can also let customers check out and place orders conversationally.
For example, e-commerce chatbots can help with the following:
- Collect customer information
- Process payments
- Confirm orders
Chatbots are projected to drive e-commerce transactions worth $122 billion by the end of 2024. It’s becoming increasingly important for e-commerce businesses to leverage chatbots to simplify the checkout process and engage with customers.
Reduced Costs
Since chatbots are fully capable of doing all customer service activities, this can help save a massive number of resources spent on hiring, training, and retaining a customer service team. They have self-learning capabilities due to machine learning technologies, which is why it requires less human interference.
Plus, companies can focus more on their core business operations by efficiently deploying chatbots in e-commerce. Besides, chatbots leave little or no room for costly errors and mistakes.
Criteria to Consider When Choosing an AI Chatbot for E-commerce
Integration Capabilities
Before choosing an AI chatbot, make sure it integrates with your website (or commerce engine) and any other tools you need it to connect with—CRMs, support management systems, payment gateways, etc.
For example, if your store is hosted on an e-commerce platform like Shopify, the chatbot needs to have a Shopify integration.
Customization and Personalization Options
Each business has its unique brand identity and customer preferences. Look for an AI chatbot that offers customization options to align with your brand’s identity—both visual identity and voice personality.
For example, a chatbot should offer options to customize the font size, color, and other visual elements of the interface. You should also look for personalization features that enable your bot to greet customers based on their names or respond with specific language preferences.
Multilingual
Customers from all over the world reach out to brands through their preferred language and channel of communication. It’s essential for businesses to be able to provide customers with the same level of experience regardless of language.
Ensure that your AI chatbot is multilingual and can detect the user’s preferred language to respond with accurate translation and dynamic content.
Analytics and Reporting
To evaluate the effectiveness of your chatbot and identify areas for improvement, powerful analytics and reporting features are essential.
Look for a chatbot platform that provides detailed insights into user interactions, conversation flows, user satisfaction, and conversion rates.
This data will help you understand customer preferences, identify bottlenecks, and refine the chatbot's performance over time.
7 Best AI Chatbots for E-Commerce
- Chatling
- Chatfuel
- Manychat
- Tidio
- Ada
- Octane AI
- Flow XO
1. Chatling
Chatling is an AI chatbot that allows any e-commerce business to create, train, and implement a custom chatbot in minutes.
With Chatling, you have a range of ways to train your chatbot. You can link it to the website and sitemap URLs, or upload documents for training. It also lets you customize conversation by giving your chatbots detailed instructions to follow when generating responses.
Everything about your chatbot is customizable, too—from the chat widget’s placement and icon to colors, fonts, tone, and more.
Relevant Features
- Train on Custom Data: Train your chatbot using websites, sitemaps, PDFs, Word docs, TXT files, and more.
- Full Chatbot Customization: Alter everything about your chatbot—from the widget position to colors, icons, fonts, and responses.
- Add to Any Website: Easily integrate the chatbot into any website with native integrations (Shopify, Squarespace, WordPress, etc.) and an intuitive API.
- Collect Leads: Gather relevant information from users to generate leads and capture potential customer data.
- Detailed Analytics: Access comprehensive data and insights on user interactions, engagement, and performance of the chatbot.
- Multilingual: Supports multiple languages to cater to a diverse user base.
2. Chatfuel
Chatfuel is an AI chatbot tool that automates conversations across Meta products—Facebook Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp.
Chatfuel’s chatbots can offer product recommendations based on preferences, send personalized offers and promo codes, and automate customer support. They also integrate with Stripe for conversational payment processing.
Relevant Features
- Product Recommendations: Recommend products based on customer preferences.
- Personalized Offers and Promo Codes: Personalize their offers and promo codes, creating an interactive experience for customers.
- Payment Integration: Accept payments instantly through Stripe without redirecting customers to a checkout page.
- Audience Engagement: Respond to each person who clicks on your ads, helping to engage consumers.
Pricing
Chatfuel offers separate plans for Facebook & Instagram and WhatsApp.
Facebook & Instagram plans start at $14.39/month, while WhatsApp plans start at $41.29/month. An Enterprise plan is available for both sets of channels.
Pros and Cons
Pros
- Has an easy setup process that does not require coding
- You can build chatbots with functional blocks in a visual environment
Cons
- Only supports Meta products
- Limited functionality
3. Manychat
Manychat is an AI chatbot platform that specializes in automating Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Instagram, email, and SMS conversations.
Like Chatfuel, Manychat lets users create dynamic and interactive chatbots that adapt to the customer's behavior and preferences. Manychat also provides analytics and insights to help users optimize their chatbot performance and improve their customer experience.
Relevant Features
- Order Updates: Send notifications to your customers about the status of their orders, improving your customer service and loyalty.
- Abandoned Cart Recovery Flows: Increase your sales by sending reminders to your customers who left products in their cart without buying them.
- Coupons & Promotions: Offer discount codes to your customers, attracting them with special deals.
- Analytics: Access =analytics tools that measure customer behavior, conversions, and key performance indicators, helping you make data-driven decisions.
Pricing
Manychat offers three pricing plans—Free, Pro, and Premium.
The Free plan allows you to engage up to 1,000 contacts with basic features. The Pro plan offers advanced features and scales the pricing based on the number of contacts, starting at $15 per month. The Premium plan provides personalized support, 24/7 ticket support, and unlimited training with a customer success manager.
Pros and Cons
Pros:
- Low cost
- Facebook-approved
- Easy to use
Cons:
- Not suitable for large businesses
- Limited integration support
4. Tidio
Tidio is a customer service platform that uses AI to help small and medium-sized businesses boost customer satisfaction.
It offers AI-assisted live chat as well as both rule-based and AI chatbots that can answer common questions, provide real-time solutions, and suggest products based on customer behavior. AI conversations can be managed from the main dashboard and analyzed for insights into performance.
Relevant Features
- Lyro AI: Deliver personalized support and solve most customer problems with AI.
- Routing: Transfer customers to live support agents when AI is unable to solve their problems.
- Order Management: Access order details, status, customer information, and communicate with customers through messages and notifications.
- Analytics: Fine-tune your AI chatbots with detailed analytics covering customer sentiment, success rates and more.
Pricing
All Tidio plans include 50 Lyro conversations free of charge.
For more AI chatbot conversations, you’ll need to purchase Lyro add-ons ($39/month) for 50 additional conversations each (up to 250 max). The Tidio+ plan ($394+/month) allows you to set a custom limit for Lyro conversations.
Pros and Cons
Pros:
- Provides unified communication
- Can automate your customers’ FAQs
- Features integrations with leading business applications
Cons:
- Limited social media integration
- Delayed notifications
5. Ada
Ada is a platform that automates e-commerce customer service with conversational AI and a range of integrations.
The platform integrates a range of communication channels and e-commerce tools with its Enterprise-ready chatbot-building solution to let customers self-serve quicker and more efficiently.
Relevant Features
- E-Commerce Integrations: Connect Ada to your tools and systems to automate shipping, refunds, exchanges, and more.
- Scale Support: Manage high ticket volumes during peak seasons. Ada's chatbot handles most of the support requests and solves over 80% of them without human intervention.
- Answer Complex Questions: Ada's AI uses pre-written answers and language cues to respond. It also improves its performance by analyzing conversations.
Pricing
Contact sales for a quote.
Pros and Cons
Pros:
- Easy to use and intuitive platform
- Quick and efficient customer support
- Ability to automate customer interactions and resolve inquiries
- Multilingual support in various languages
Cons:
- Challenges in understanding and accurately measuring success metrics
- Some limitations in customization options for chatbot responses and features
6. Octane AI
Octane AI is a platform that allows Shopify brands to create engaging quizzes to personalize their marketing strategies.
Octane’s AI doesn’t interact directly with customers like the other tools on this list. Instead, you can use it to generate engaging content and analyze reviews by communicating with it in natural language.
Relevant Features
- Ecommerce Quiz Maker: Offers a simple, no-code interface that makes it easy to create engaging quizzes without requiring technical skill.
- Insights Analyst: Automate Voice of Customer (VoC) research by analyzing product reviews and generating reports.
Pricing
Octane AI offers different pricing plans for their quiz and pop-up tools.
Pricing ranges from $50 per month for the Octane plan, which includes 200 engagements, to $200 per month for the Octane Plus plan, which offers 1500 engagements.
Pros and Cons
Pros:
- Personalized product recommendations
- Audience segmentation
- Targeted messaging based on customer behavior
- Email automation and abandoned cart recovery features
Cons:
- May require some technical knowledge to set up and use effectively
- Advanced features may require familiarity with coding or technical concepts
- Some buttons and texts cannot be translated or customized
7. Flow XO
Flow XO is an automation platform that allows businesses to create and deploy AI chatbots without coding.
Flow XO can enhance customer interactions across various platforms, including websites, mobile apps, and social media channels. There are all kinds of use cases for the tool—from collecting information from leads to engaging visitors with light-hearted banter.
Relevant Features
- Accept Payments: Accept payments with Flow XO’s chatbots and execute post-purchase flows automatically.
- Answer Customer Questions: Create dynamic conversations with customers and provide fast, accurate answers to their questions.
- Manage Leads: Easily capture leads from conversation threads and nurture them with automated follow-up emails.
Pricing
Flow XO offers a range of pricing plans to accommodate businesses of all sizes.
You can start for free and then upgrade to a paid plan starting at $19 per month. Paid plans provide additional benefits such as increased interactions, more bots or active flows, team members, longer logs, AI credits, and priority support.
Pros and Cons
Pros:
- Wide functionality
- Contains its own wide variety of connections to existing platforms
- Intuitive method of creating “Flows” that determine bot actions.
- Highly customizable and allows for hundreds of integrations with external software.
Cons
- Response times can be slower compared to some competitors
- Workflow can be tedious at times
- Algorithm issues can arise without a clear diagnosis, leading to frustration
Conclusion
AI chatbots are essential for e-commerce businesses, offering 24/7 support, quick responses, and efficient problem-solving. With more customers using chatbots and the growing global conversational AI market, businesses recognize the value of AI solutions, especially chatbots.
Chatling offers e-commerce businesses a simple but powerful tool for responding to customer inquiries at scale. Connect a range of data sources, customize your chatbot, and offer your customers personalized, round-the-clock support.
Ready to enhance your customer service for your business? Try Chatling for free.