Customers expect seamless, convenient, and rewarding experiences when shopping online. There is little room for slow websites, limited payment options, product stockouts, or disorganized catalogue pages.
Support must be stellar, quick, and around the clock. Customers also expect brands to interact with them through their preferred channel. For instance, they may prefer Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp to submitting tickets through the portal.
Functioning in this highly demanding environment requires eCommerce stores to stay one step ahead in the innovation game. Shopping bots leverage automation and AI to help brands with lead generation, marketing, sales, and customer service. How exactly do they work? What is the best online shopping bot?
What is a Shopping Bot?
A shopping bot is an autonomous program designed to run tasks that ease the purchase and sale of products. For instance, it can directly interact with users, asking a series of questions and offering product recommendations.
The use of artificial intelligence in designing shopping bots has been gaining traction. AI-powered bots may have self-learning features, allowing them to get better at their job. The inclusion of natural language processing (NLP) in bots enables them to understand written text and spoken speech. Conversational AI shopping bots can have human-like interactions that come across as natural.
Shopping bots are peculiar in that they can be accessed on multiple channels. They must be available where the user selects to have the interaction. Customers can interact with the same bot on Facebook Messenger, Instagram, Slack, Skype, or WhatsApp.
Why Are Online Purchase Bots Important?
The usefulness of an online purchase bot depends on the user's needs and goals. Some buying bots automate the checkout process and help users secure exclusive deals or limited products. Bots can also search the web for affordable products or items that fit specific criteria.
E-commerce businesses may use a different set of shopping bots. These solutions aim to solve e-commerce challenges, such as increasing sales or providing 24/7 customer support.
Currently, conversational AI bots are the most exciting innovations in customer experience. They help businesses implement a dialogue-centric and conversational-driven sales strategy. For instance, customers can have a one-on-one voice or text interactions. They can receive help finding suitable products or have sales questions answered.
The money-saving potential and ability to boost customer satisfaction is drawing many businesses to AI bots.
Advantages of Shopping Bots
Many shopping bots have two simple goals, boosting sales and improving customer satisfaction. How do they deliver on this promise? Shopping bots make specific processes smoother. Let's go over some of them.
Simple product navigation
Simple product navigation means that customers don't have to waste time figuring out where to find a product. They can go to the AI chatbot and specify the product’s attributes. Of course, this cuts down on the time taken to find the correct item. With fewer frustrations and a streamlined purchase journey, your store can make more sales.
Digital self-service system
Customer representatives may become too busy to handle all customer inquiries on time reasonably. They may be dealing with repetitive requests that could be easily automated.
A shopping bot can provide self-service options without involving live agents. It can handle common e-commerce inquiries such as order status or pricing. Shopping bot providers commonly state that their tools can automate 70-80% of customer support requests. They can cut down on the number of live agents while offering support 24/7.
Fast checkout
A tedious checkout process is counterintuitive and may contribute to high cart abandonment. Across all industries, the cart abandonment rate hovers at about 70%.
Giving shoppers a faster checkout experience can help combat missed sale opportunities. Shopping bots can replace the process of navigating through many pages by taking orders directly.
AI assistants can automate the purchase of repetitive and high-frequency items. Some shopping bots even have automatic cart reminders to reengage customers.
Personalization of recommendations
According to a Yieldify Research Report, up to 75% of consumers are keen on making purchases with brands that offer personalized digital experiences.
Now, e-commerce sites are not far behind the trend. Stores personalize the shopping experience through upselling, cross-selling, and localized product pages.
Using a shopping bot can further enhance personalized experiences in an E-commerce store. The bot can provide custom suggestions based on the user's behaviour, past purchases, or profile. It can watch for various intent signals to deliver timely offers or promotions. Up to 90% of leading marketers believe that personalization can significantly boost business profitability.
Best 18 Shopping Bots for Your Business
This list contains a mix of e-commerce solutions and a consumer shopping bot. If you're looking to increase sales, offer 24/7 support, etc., you'll find a selection of 17 tools.
Some are ready-made solutions, and others allow you to build custom conversational AI bots.
We have also included an example of a buying bot that shortens the checkout process to milliseconds (18).
Let’s get started:
1. Dasha.ai
Dasha is a platform that allows developers to build human-like conversational apps. The ability to synthesize emotional speech overtones comes as standard.
There is support for all popular platforms and messaging channels. You can even embed text and voice conversation capabilities into existing apps.
Because you can build anything from scratch, there is a lot of potentials. You may generate self-service solutions and apps to control IoT devices or create a full-fledged automated call center. The declarative DashaScript language is simple to learn and creates complex apps with fewer lines of code.
2. Customers.ai
Customers.ai is the official successor to MobileMonkey. Its current platform focuses on visitor identification and remarketing for Shopify brands, including Klaviyo audience enrichment and re-engagement workflows. This differs from MobileMonkey's former Messenger chatbot toolkit.
3. Yellow.ai
Yellow.ai, formerly Yellow Messenger, is a fully-fledged conversation CX platform. Its customer support automation solution includes an AI bot that can resolve customer queries and engage with leads proactively to boost conversations. The conversational AI can automate text interactions across 35 channels. It similarly supports voice automation workflows.
4. Ada
Ada makes brands continuously available and responsive to customer interactions. Its automated AI solutions allow customers to self-serve at any stage of their buyer’s journey. The no-code platform will enable brands to build meaningful brand interactions in any language and channel.
5. Chatfuel
Businesses can build a no-code chatbox on Chatfuel to automate various processes, such as marketing, lead generation, and support. For instance, you can qualify leads by asking them questions using the Messenger Bot or send people who click on Facebook ads to the conversational bot. The platform is highly trusted by some of the largest brands and serves over 100 million users per month.
6. GoBot
Confused customers rarely convert. That's why GoBot, a buying bot, asks each shopper a series of questions to recommend the perfect products and personalize their store experience. Customers can also have any questions answered 24/7, thanks to Gobot’s AI support automation.
7. Siena AI
Siena AI is the official successor to Cartloop. The current product provides AI customer-experience agents for commerce brands, combining automated support with personalized shopper assistance. This differs from Cartloop's former SMS cart-recovery service.
8. BargainBot
BargainBot seeks to replace the old boring way of offering discounts by allowing customers to haggle the price. It was the first negotiation bot for WooCommerce. The bot can strike deals with customers before allowing them to proceed to checkout. It also comes with exit intent detection to reduce page abandonments.
9. Inyncai AI
Insyncai is a shopping boat specially made for eCommerce website owners. It can improve various aspects of the customer experience to boost sales and improve satisfaction. For instance, it offers personalized product suggestions and pinpoints the location of items in a store. It can remind customers of items they forgot in the shopping cart. The app also allows businesses to offer 24/7 automated customer support.
10. Actionbot
Actionbot acts as an advanced digital assistant that offers operational and sales support. It can observe and react to customer interactions on your website, for instance, helping users fill forms automatically or suggesting support options. The digital assistant also recommends products and services based on the user profile or previous purchases. It also provides navigational support.
11. Certainly
Certainly empowers businesses to leverage the power of conversational AI solutions to convert more of their traffic into customers. Rather than providing a ready-built bot, customers can build their conversational assistants with easy-to-use templates. You can create bots that provide checkout help, handle return requests, offer 24/7 support, or direct users to the right products.
12. ViaSay
ViaSay is the verified successor to Mindsay's chatbot assets. Its current AI chatbot product provides personalized 24/7 customer support and can automate common service interactions.
13. Engati
Engati is a Shopify chatbot built to help store owners engage and retain their customers. It does come with intuitive features, including the ability to automate customer conversations. The bot works across 15 different channels, from Facebook to email. You can create user journeys for price inquires, account management, order status inquires, or promotional pop-up messages.
14. Shopmessage
Shopmessage is a marketing-shopping bot for Facebook messenger. The platform has been gaining traction and now supports over 12,000+ brands. Their solution performs many roles, including fostering frictionless opt-ins and sending alerts at the right moment for cart abandonments, back-in-stock, and price reductions.
15. Gnani.ai
Gnani.ai makes several promises with their conversational AI solution. It promises up to 70% cost benefits, and you pay for the outcome/KPI. Brands can use the platform to build personalized and scalable virtual assistants. Their advanced omnichannel analytics constantly collects and analyzes customer interactions to draw deep insights to help teams improve on key CX metrics.
16. Verloop
Verloop is a conversational AI platform that strives to replicate the in-store assistance experience across digital channels. Users can access various features like multiple intent recognition, proactive communications, and personalized messaging. You can leverage it to reconnect with previous customers, retarget abandoned carts, among other e-commerce user cases.
17. Jenny by LeadDesk
Jenny provides self-service chatbots intending to ensure that businesses serve all their customers, not just a select few. The no-code chatbot may be used as a standalone solution or alongside live chat applications such as Zendesk, Facebook Messenger, SpanEngage, among others. Jenny is now part of LeadDesk after its acquisition in July 2021.
In addition to the eCommerce CX shopping bots, here is an example of a purchase bot used by consumers:
18. Cybersole
CyberSole is an online purchase bot for checkout automation. It supports 250 plus retailers and claims to have facilitated over 2 million successful checkouts. For instance, customers can shop on sites such as Offspring, Footpatrol, Travis Scott Shop, and more. Their latest release, Cybersole 5.0, promises intuitive features like advanced analytics, hands-free automation, and billing randomization to bypass filtering.
Bottom Line
A shopping bot can be a game-changer for your store. It can help solve recurring problems and take you to the next level. While you can select from ready-built solutions, you can similarly develop highly-customized shopping bots on the Dasha.AI platform. Here is a sneak peek of what’s possible:
Conversational AI hotel front desk receptionist
Are you a developer? Join the Dasha Developer Community to get started and to learn about the Dasha.AI.