Over the past decades, e-commerce platforms have gradually walked into our daily lives and have become an obligatory part of global marketing. Like many other industries, the e-commerce industry has also undergone a considerable transformation succeeding the initiation of the internet. With the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, the e-commerce industry has seen a sharp rise in its business. With physical stores closing their doors due to government-enforced lockdown, online ordering was the only feasible solution for customers. Subsequently, as a result, retail websites generated almost 22 billion visits in June 2020 as compared to 16.07 billion global visits in January 2020. 

So, in an industry with such a large audience and extreme competition, outstanding customer experience is the only way to stand and create competitive differentiation. Successively incorporating chatbots in e-commerce businesses has become crucial. Chatbots can quickly provide seamless customer support, process automation, sales, and marketing and reduce total costs. Many big companies worldwide have already started using chatbots and have created an incredible impact on their customers, and one such example is Amrutam’s chatbot developed by dolphinchat. Amrutam is an e-commerce store providing ayurvedic lifestyle products. It uses a messenger chatbot to interact with its customers. Through this chatbot, customers can view their products, order their products, know more details about products, and can even raise a query, if any. This ease of access to customers has helped Amrutam increase leads and reduce support call volume by half. Another example of chatbots being a trendsetter in E-commerce would beeBay, whose chatbot helps customers find products impeccably suited to them. All these chatbot strategies make your customer satisfied and promote your brand or service, which is why chatbot is becoming the new trend for e-commerce. 

What can a chatbot do in an e-commerce business?

Let us have a look at all things a chatbot can do for the e-commerce industry.

•  Answer customer queries instantaneously.

Chatbots come to the rescue when the customers have general questions about the e-commerce sites or apps, like the questions about their account, username, password, or app-related queries.

• Guide customers to complete their purchase 

Chatbots help buyers to solve their problem which they face during their purchase. They may query about the steps to be followed for ordering, offers they are eligible for, delivery date, and method.

• Suggests product recommendations and new offers and deals

These chatbots made with Artificial Intelligence can automatically recommend some products to the customers based on their past orders. They can give them unique offers and discounts depending on the loyalty of the user.

• Provide customer support and take feedbacks 

Whenever any customer faces any problem with the delivered items, they can take help from the chatbot, and the chatbot will help solve the problem. It can even take feedback from the customers to improve their service.

• Provide tracking and other order information

Customers would like to know when their order will be delivered and other details about their order. Chatbots could access real-time instantaneous data to keep the customers aware of their products.

 

Advantages of using a chatbot in your e-commerce business

• Provide answers instantaneously 

The chatbot response time is quite fast, even compared to live chat, as it delivers automated messages. Research says that 60% of customers feel that long holds and wait times are the most frustrating parts of a service experience, affecting your brand image.

• Available to everyone every time 

These are automated chatting systems and are open to every customer 24*7. Customers can communicate with these chatbots without thinking about the timing, which can make them happy. Of course, satisfied customers are crucial to your business’s success.

• A cost-efficient option 

Chatbot requires a one-time cost initially, but in the long run, it is a cost-effective option as the company does not need to pay a reasonable amount to support representatives. Juniper Research states that chatbots will help businesses save more than $8 billion per year by 2022.

• Ensures scalability while the company is growing 

Since these are automated chatting systems, so when a company expands, it will not adversely affect the chatbot system as they are scalable and can manage many customers simultaneously.

• Improves itself through constant feedback

Chatbots require the use of Artificial Intelligence. It takes feedback from the customer, demonstrating the business’s will to serve customers better. Based on that input, it also improves itself to provide better quality service.

• Boosts sales and advertises new products.

Chatbots could also be used for marketing and sales purposes and push customers for new products. It can identify the top-selling products & services and can use them to advertise their business.

Disadvantages of using a chatbot in your e-commerce business

Although compared to the advantages of having a chatbot, cons are insignificant, but let us look over them.

• Does not provide human-touch and solution to uncommon queries

Sometimes, it is possible that these chatbots cannot solve some complex problems or might even not understand the problem, and hence, they cannot provide a solution for that. Also, some customers might feel the lack of human-touch while communicating.

Conclusion

Implementing a chatbot into your e-commerce product will help you with your customers and give you the practical benefit needed to maximize sales and profitability in this cut-throat world of e-commerce. So, looking for a custom chatbot for your e-commerce website or app? You are at the right place, then. At DolphinChat, we help the e-commerce industry by increasing sales, scaling their support, and upgrading their customer experience by leveraging AI-enabled chatbots. It allows organizations to scale efficiently by providing 24*7 support, automating repetitive consumer queries, converting tedious forms to interactive experiences for lead generation. Thus, improving the customer service, increasing the team efficiency, enhancing the customer experience, and personalizing the communication with consumers.

One of the chatbots we have made for the e-commerce business is EcommerceBot. This chatbot powered by DolphinChat enables fully automated virtual digital stores for E-commerce companies, including everything from pre-sales to purchase and post-sales customer experience.

Some salient features of our chatbots are:

• It gives the sales team a helping hand.
• It supercharges sales and scales efforts without increasing employees.
• It provides effortless customer support round the clock.
• It also offers personalized recommendations.
• It resolves customer complaints faster.

Many successful brands like e-bay, H&M, and JioMart have already started using chatbots to connect better with their consumers, provide improved customer service, manage order status queries, recommend products, etc. So if you are a growing e-commerce company and desire to achieve your objectives, now there should be no doubt that you have to implement chatbot to your service for so many reasons.