How to increase your Magento’s Store Sales using AI-Chatbots

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Chatbots Life

10 min readSep 21, 2019

Online Shopping is the Gold Rush of the 21st century. From Enterprises to SMEs, everyone is hopping on the digital platform because consumers are finding it convenient to shop online. E-Commerce has been there for a long time and yet it’s still drawing consumers every single day. E-Commerce websites are actively pursuing growth and revenues by leveraging technology. Organizations looking to expand or build E-Commerce presence all have one aspect in common — CMS (Content Management System) and Magento is one of the most preferred CMS in the world.

Magento

Magento is an open-source CMS that is giving business owners ample opportunities in expanding their business operations in the digital e-commerce world. If any organizations are planning to create an online store for selling their products, Magento remains one of the preferred choices. It’s a powerful product with essential features for e-commerce companies.

Shoppers have a high expectation of E-commerce Websites about the high performance, security, innovative interactions. Reason for Magneto popularity is its inherent ability and capacity to handle a large number of customers seeking many products. As the consumer will congregate on the website and surf through the multiple products and landing pages, organizations will be seeing a need to streamline the services. Magneto is a highly scalable platform for enabling the organization in creating a shopping experience ranging from the size of a small store to a Walmart like store. From listing 25/50/100 products to 2000 products, Magneto is defying expectations.

Do Magneto Driven E-Commerce Websites need Chatbots?

Online Shopping doesn’t have a linear path for the consumers, there are multiple channels for buying online products- Apps, E-Mail, Social Media. Customers are always buzzing through the website. Thus it makes sense to build a relationship with the consumers. E-Commerce firms are plugging chatbots to instantly communicate with customers and answer their queries regarding their products. The higher engagement with consumers turns a simple visit into a SALE. These 24*7 AI-powered chatbots can infer customers’ preferences and can create a personalized conversational experience.

As per recent studies, 80% of businesses plan to use chatbots to propel their online businesses by 2020.

Stats about Chatbots in E-Commerce:

Baby Boomers (age 55+) are more likely to expect benefits from chatbots than Millennials(age 18–34).
83% of online shoppers need support during shopping thus the customer service chatbot will come handy for the consumers seeking help.
The global chatbot market is expected to reach $1.23 billion by 2025 with a compounding annual growth rate of 24.3%, according to a Grand View Research report.
Research conducted by Frost and Sullivan predicts B2B eCommerce sales to reach $12 trillion globally by 2020, with China and the US leading the global market.

The above statistics highlight the phenomenal growth of E-Commerce Business and it’s making sense to have chatbots online24/7 for engaging the consumers. Hiring human resources to interact with consumers is a time and money-wasting exercise, while deploying Chatbots is an effective and logical decision as they are inexpensive and far more efficient.

How Chatbots can help an e-commerce business?

Let’s look at some of the needs the E-Commerce websites that can be fulfilled by Smart Chatbots:

Instant Customer Service.

Providing customer service is the first need of an E-Commerce Website. Often, the businesses hire human agents to answer the customer’s questions about services, products, payments, etc. Hiring human agents to answer mundane and repetitive questions round the clock is tiring and a highly expensive exercise. If there are no human agents to answer questions, there is a 100% chance of losing the customer. Every customer visit is a prospective sales opportunity. So, instead of hiring human resources to be online 24/7, E-Commerce websites can set-up Chatbots to engage with visitors and drive forward the conversion rates higher.

Generating Leads from the High Quantum of Website Traffic

Chatbots can do more than just customer service as they can also generate qualified leads. Chatbots will go beyond the normal customer service options by becoming an outlet for sales and marketing. Chatbots drives forward user engagement by interacting with the website visitors and convert user visits into leads.

Below is an illustration of how E-Commerce Chatbots are turning visits into leads into sales:

Chatbot interacting with a visitor on a E-Commerce Website

The 3 images show the dynamic engagement of the Chatbot with the user. The visitor will share his contact details and eventually might end up making a transaction.

Scalability

E-Commerce websites experience fluctuations in website traffic over a period of time. They will get high surges in website traffic during sales such as Christmas Sale, New Year Sale or Black Friday Sale. Hiring Human agents for a short duration of time to deal with heavy traffic is unsustainable in terms of training and costs.

The chatbots scalability aided by NLP helps them to strike a conversation with website users and engage the interested leads. Chatbots are an effective tool as they can learn and get swiftly deployed within days. Chatbots can handle routine, mundane questions itself (which is usually 80% of the total queries) and pass on the complex queries to the Human agents.

Answering Repeated Questions

Chatbots can swiftly perform the basic support tasks that human agents does

Answer the customer’s basic questions
Grievance Redressal
Shipping Details
Payment Inquiries

Chatbots’ functions are evolving with time as they are becoming the front-line Agents in helping the customers. Chatbots are built to speed up customer’s purchases, offer new recommendations while providing 24/7 customer services.

24*7 availability

Chatbots are available around the clock and engages with the visitor regularly with effectiveness. As per a study done by Juniper, chatbots were believed to cut costs by over $20 million in 2017. So, by getting the Chatbots online all the time, organizations can save money. Chatbots are inexpensive and available around the clock for resolving queries instantly and accurately — significantly reducing the wait time for the end customer.

Helping customers find the right product

Chatbots can be the ultimate Assistant in helping the consumers find the desired product. By engaging & interacting with the end customer, the chatbot can build up a persona of the end customer. Using the persona, the chatbot can suggest relevant products to the customer.

E-commerce websites normally host thousands of products and it is often a tiresome task in navigating to the right product using the website’s traditional menu. Customers sometimes are not even aware of which category to look the product in. In such scenarios, chatbots can just offer help like asking users “What are you looking for?” and can, using their NLP capabilities, can understand the customer’s query and provide them with relevant links to the product.

Once the customer’s queries are solved and his concerns are resolved, the chatbots will assist them in making payments & completing the transaction.

If the visitor is reading about some amazing product, the bot can intimate them about price, answer various questions and drive them to the order of the product.

What features to look for before choosing a Chatbot?

Finding the right chatbot platform that would fit into a Magento website is pretty important. There are some important points to consider before embarking on the decision to deploy a Chatbot for the Website:

1. Hybrid Chat Platform — AI + Human

A hybrid chatbot combines human agents and AI for delivering better customer experience. The chatbot first handles all the user queries and passes over the conversation only when it fails to understand the complex user input. Users will never get the “Sorry, I can’t understand you” response and the visitor will be then connected to the Human Agent. The hybrid AI chatbot enables E-Commerce websites to improve customer service quality.

2. NLP/FAQ

Chatbots should be able to understand the natural text query by a customer and should be able to give the precise answer by offering personalized conversational flow just like a human agent. It should be able to learn from previous human interactions and to improve itself over time.

3. API Webhook

For an e-commerce chatbot to be effective, it should be able to interact with Magento CMS via API webhooks. An API webhook can help chatbots to retrieve data directly from Magento and to provide customers with precise information. API Webhooks can be used for various functions like:

Calculating Shipping Fees
Placing Orders
Providing order status
Helping with order cancellation/refunds
Delivering Invoices of payment
Data Collection

4. Payment Option in Chatbot

Setting up the payment option in the chatbot is a game-changer in itself. Reasons why the payment option in the Chatbot is an excellent choice:

Complete the entire transaction with the payment within the chat itself
Saves the consumer a lot of time
Keeps the consumer hooked and make sure the engagement turns into actual sales.

Sample of a payment in chatbot from IntelliTicks

Top E-Commerce websites are combining chatbot user engagement with seamless online payments. This helps in increasing sales for the website and leads to more growth & revenues. Payment options drive more transactions. Enables the visitors to buy what’s their need without navigating between different web pages, shopping cart and different product pages.

5. Menu for Quick Options

Sample of a menu in chatbot from IntelliTicks

Offering the user options in the Chatbot is a sure shot way to reduce waiting time for consumers. A Menu within Chatbot will provide quick options to the general/Common questions customers ask. The customer shall click the question which he wants the Chatbot to answer. The normal conversation flow would be initiated for the selected option. The user doesn’t need to write the query as it’s already available in the options provided. As E-Commerce websites deal with some Common queries such as Order Tracking, Calculating Shipping Fee; the Chatbot facilitates query resolution in a short time. In case, the query is complex and beyond the natural understanding of the Chatbot, the control of conversation will flow to the human agent.

Top 5 AI Chatbots platform for Magento:

Liveperson

Integrates with Facebook and Twitter.
Captures information to generate automatic reports.
Chatbots can be optimized and deployed.
Pricing Plans: Is not open. You need to connect with their sales team for details.

2. IntelliTicks

Provide Hybrid Chat Platform — Both AI + Human
Deeper API Integrations
Has Payment-in-chat option
Has Menu-in-chat option
Suitable for SMEs
Affordable Pricing Plans — Starts from $0 per month

3. Intercom

The ability to send email campaigns
Set up notification/chat campaigns and live chat with customers.
Provides team inbox features
Easy to use — the core functionalities are super easy.
Price — Starts at $87/month. But can get very expensive as your user base grows. (Best for B2B companies)

4. Zoho SalesIQ

Easy to Install
Integrated with other Zoho products
Confusion about some features
Has a chatbot builder, but requires you to code for it

5. Zendesk

Multi-channel support: email, web, phone, chat, social media
Pre-built: Salesforce, SugarCRM
Flexible ticket management with automated workflow

Conclusion:

For an E-Commerce organization, Chatbot’s ultimate aim is to increase conversions from website visitors while engaging the users.

Chatbots possess the potential to reduce support and customer service costs. E-Commerce Landscape is evolving as Tech increases its influence on the way they approach business. Create an enjoyable Shopping experience for the visitors and embrace the Chatbot technology.

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