How Chatbots are Shaping the Ecommerce Industry
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Alex Levine is a Digital Strategist for a Top SEO Agency in Canada. He takes an in-depth, hands-on approach to startup social business strategy. He has experience in digital marketing, social media, content strategy, and marketing communications. |
Chatbot is a subset of artificial intelligence that can conduct conversations. Chatbots are also called by many different names like talkbots, interactive agents, artificial conversational entity, IM bots, and chatterbots among others. Chatbots have been causing a stir in the ecommerce industry as more and ecommerce sites integrate chatbots into their systems.
So, what’s causing the commotion? What can chatbots really do for e-commerce businesses? Are chatbots really that good? Should chatbots be integrated on my ecommerce site? Let’s try to have all these questions answered.
The Rise of Chatbots in Ecommerce
In the realms of ecommerce, chatbots are used to help provide shopping suggestions to your site’s visitors, as well as to answer simple questions that do not need human rationalization.
Chatbots are so helpful that even Amazon has its own chatbot named Alexa, which is not just a gimmick to join in on the hype, but a great tool that provides highly-personalized shopping experience to the e-shopping giant’s customers.
Here are specific ways on how chatbots are shaping the ecommerce industry:
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- Hyper-personalization. Ecommerce businesses have found the potential of chatbots to personalize the shopping experience of site visitors to the highest degree. Thanks to chatbots, online shoppers are provided with product information that are of their interest. Chatbots can do this by collecting data on location, past actions on the site, and interest.
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- Better customer engagement. Customers felt better engaged when chatbots came along. With the chatbots’ ability to gather information to help provide the right suggestions, online shoppers feel that they are understood more by these businesses. And this is a good thing. In service businesses, just being able to identify the name of the client and offering them their usual choice makes a huge difference. This gives a feel to customers that you take the effort of knowing them and what they want, so they feel more connected, and they end up becoming loyal customers. The same feel is said to be achieved thanks to chatbots.
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- Better push notifications. E-commerce businesses integrate e-mail marketing to their strategy in different ways. Some concentrate on just providing new launches, as well as promotions. Smarter e-mail marketing campaigns offer products that are of the interest of a specific customer. Again, chatbots help achieve this. This is very efficient as there is no need to flood your customers with emails regarding products that they don’t like, only those that the customer is most likely to buy.
- Customer service right at your fingertips. One of the best ways how chatbots can help is by being customer service agents that run 24 hours, 7 days a week, and with no salary, no rest, and not that pricey too. Chatbots can also answer basic questions, saving you the need to a lot too many human customer service personnel who get so much simple questions. Reserve human thinking to concerns that really need it. For everything else, you can trust chatbots.
Chatbots: Reshaping the E-commerce Industry
Chatbots truly are effective implementation of artificial intelligence to a business-like e-commerce. When done right, chatbots are some of the best tools you can have on your arsenal. So, try to make use of chatbots now and watch it help reshape the way your e-commerce business rolls.
Curious on how to integrate chatbots with your CS-Cart account? Ask an expert here!
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Yan Anderson is the Head of Content Marketing at CS-Cart with over 10 years of experience in the eCommerce industry. He's passionate about explaining complicated things in simple terms. Yan has expertise in building, running and growing eCommerce marketplaces. He loves to educate people about best practices, new technologies, and trends in the global eCommerce industry.