Chatbot For Ecommerce — How to Reduce Shopping Cart Abandonment with A Chatbot

Shopping cart abandonment isn’t an insurmountable challenge. More and more ecommerce businesses have been countering it by building an ecommerce chatbot for website. When running an online store, you ideally want every shopping cart to make its way to checkout. Unfortunately, not all of them do. Findings from multiple global surveys suggest that over two-thirds of all online shopping carts end up getting abandoned.

These staggering numbers spell particularly bad news for new ecommerce businesses that are already spread too thin in terms of resources.

Here are a few tips on how you can reduce your cart abandonment rate with the help of ecommerce chatbot development.

1. Organize your website.

The fewer roadblocks and information gaps shoppers encounter on your website, the less likely they’ll be to leave midway through the buying process. To this end, the first thing you need to focus on is organizing your website in a way that it makes sense to your potential customers. Choosing to create an ecommerce chatbot helps you fast-forward this process.

Chatbots make ecommerce websites easy to use. They can scan the entire content of your site — from product details to store policies — to retrieve the information that a potential customer needs. All the shopper needs to do is ask for this information in their own words.

Let’s say that you run a home improvement e-store selling everything from furniture to kitchenware. Your website has a ton of data and countless pages of product listings. But if a shopper drops by looking for a set of measuring cups, all they need to do is ask your chatbot.

Shopper: “I’m looking for a set of nestable measuring cups.”

Chatbot: “Happy to help! Here are our top-rated measuring cup and spoon sets. You can use this link to view our complete range of measuring cups, spoons, jugs and kitchen scales.”

2. Eliminate surprises.

Shopping carts often get abandoned because shoppers come across a new piece of information just when they’re about to go ahead with their order. This could happen in many ways. Your product descriptions might not be clear enough, with technical details hidden away in sections that shoppers miss while browsing your site. Or maybe your shipping costs and returns policy aren’t clearly mentioned on your product pages. In any of these situations, the outcome is the same — customers don’t feel confident in their buying decision, and leave your website without completing their purchase.

Building chatbots allows ecommerce businesses to eliminate these unwanted surprises from the outset. The best chatbots for ecommerce websites have detailed, up-to-date scripts that allow them to retrieve information about products, shipping, returns and refunds as and when a customer asks for it. By keeping your customers informed at every stage of the buying process, your online ecommerce chatbot reduces their cart abandonment risk.

3. Use a real person behind the chatbot.

The very reason online chatbots work is that they emulate the dynamic experience of talking to another ‘person’, as opposed to getting information from static webpages. The best chatbots for ecommerce websites take things up a notch by having an actual person behind them. With someone monitoring its chats, your AI bot’s messages will have a ‘human’ touch. At the same time, visitors who interact with it will feel reassured that someone is actually reading their messages. This often encourages them to submit their contact information, knowing that the person on the other end of the chat screen will call them back.

4. Make your customers the center of the conversation.

It doesn’t take long for someone to lose interest in a conversation that isn’t about them. This applies to online shopping just as much as it does to social interactions. Make sure that you create a chatbot script that focuses on what your visitors are looking for, and not on how good your products are.

The best ecommerce chatbots don’t just provide effective solutions. They also use AI and natural language processing to echo their visitor’s language, incorporating the words they use in their responses. This is a great way to make your shoppers feel heard and understood, which in turn encourages them to keep going with their purchase. Take a look at the interaction below:

Shopper: “How quickly do you process refunds?”

Chatbot: “We’ll process your refund as quickly as possible — typically within 5 business days from the product pick-up. It usually takes another 2–3 business days for the refund to show up in your account.”

Instead of sending out a boilerplate response about returns and refunds, the chatbot tailors its answer using the shopper’s language. At the same time, it includes all essential details that the shopper asked for.

5. Give your customers what they want.

People like interacting with chatbots more than they like navigating ecommerce websites on their own. More and more online shoppers are now expecting to find a chatbot on every online shopping website. Create an ecommerce chatbot to give your customers a familiar shopping environment, wherein they can ask a friendly AI bot for product information, side-by-side comparisons, and store policies, without spending hours on research or waiting while a support representative finds them what they need.

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