Top 8 best ecommerce chatbots for your online store

What is an ecommerce chatbot?

An ecommerce chatbot is an AI-powered software program that provides an instant human-like conversation experience at scale to help customers during their online shopping experience. These intelligent assistants can be easily integrated into various platforms, including websites and mobile applications, allowing you to interact with your customers wherever they are.

Ecommerce AI chatbots can engage customers based on predetermined conditions, events, or alerts triggered by user behavior. By combining AI and machine learning technologies, chatbots can understand customer inquiries, provide helpful information, and even make individual product recommendations based on the customer's preferences and browsing history.

This level of personalized attention enhances the customer journey and allows you to cost-effectively scale your services without compromising on care.

How to use an ecommerce chatbot

There are various ways you can leverage ecommerce AI chatbots to assist customers on their shopping journey, from initial interest all the way to post-purchase support. Let’s examine some of their main use cases.

Boosting engagement

Chatbots are the perfect way to encourage customers to spend more time on your site. Ecommerce AI chatbots can build loyalty by offering personalized product recommendations, interactive quizzes, or other engaging content. This increased engagement can lead to higher conversion rates and repeat business, as customers feel more connected to your brand and valued as individuals. Chatbots can also notify customers of special promotions, new product launches, or other relevant information, keeping them informed and interested in your business.

Providing sales support

Beyond customer support, chatbots can assist in the sales process by providing customers with the information they need to make informed purchasing decisions. This includes offering product comparisons, answering detailed questions about features and specifications, or providing custom recommendations based on preferences and past purchases. By optimizing the sales process and offering helpful, pertinent information, chatbots improve customer satisfaction and increase the odds of a successful sale.

Answering FAQs

Ecommerce chatbots trained on your data and content can provide instant and relevant answers to customers’ Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs), reducing the frustrating wait for human support. Capable of handling a high volume of queries simultaneously, chatbots allow you to greatly expand your customer support operations without hiring more staff.

Lead generation and qualification

By starting conversations with website visitors, chatbots can capture valuable information like contact details, preferences, and interests. This data helps you qualify leads based on predefined criteria, enabling you to focus your sales efforts on the most promising prospects. By automating the lead generation and qualification process, chatbots save time and resources while enhancing lead quality.

Abandoned cart recovery

Chatbots can reengage customers who have abandoned their carts, offering personalized assistance and incentives to encourage order completion. For instance, your chatbot could offer a discount code, provide more product information, or simply remind customers of the items left behind. Automating strategies like these with AI chatbots can reduce cart abandonment and raise your revenue.

Post-purchase support and feedback

AI ecommerce chatbots can provide product setup instructions or troubleshooting guidance. This timely and helpful support enhances customer satisfaction and lightens the load on human customer service teams. Plus, chatbots can gather opinions from customers, helping you identify areas for improvement and make data-driven decisions to refine your products and services.

Monitoring and improvement

Ecommerce AI chatbot data helps identify areas for improvement, such as common points of confusion or frustration. Regularly reviewing chatbot conversations and customer feedback allows you to refine chatbot responses, optimize performance, and ensure the chatbot keeps meeting customer needs.

The 8 best ecommerce chatbots

Here are the top 8 ecommerce chatbots that you might consider for your online store.

Choosing a new ecommerce chatbot is key for businesses looking to enhance the customer experience and drive down customer service costs. With numerous platforms available, it's essential to evaluate your options carefully. In this section, we round up today’s 8 best ecommerce chatbots and break down all their pros and cons to help you make an informed decision.

1. Sendbird's AI Chatbot: Best for enhancing customer support, streamlining operations, and boosting customer loyalty

Compared to its competitors, Sendbird's new ecommerce AI chatbot offers several unique features and benefits, and stands out as the best ecommerce AI chatbot for your business.

Sendbird leverages advanced natural language processing and machine learning to provide accurate and contextual responses, ensuring a smooth and satisfying customer experience.

Key features of Sendbird's ecommerce chatbot

• Multilingual support: Sendbird’s AI chatbot speaks over 100 languages, breaking down language barriers and enabling a seamless and inclusive experience.

• Customizable workflows: Adjust the chatbot's responses and actions to reflect your brand's unique voice and business processes.

• Smooth integration with human agents: Ensure a seamless transition from the chatbot to human support when necessary, maintaining a consistent customer experience.

• Comprehensive dashboard: Monitor your chatbot's performance and effectiveness, gaining insights to continuously enhance its impact.

Sendbird's chatbot solution is versatile and offers the flexibility to meet the specific needs of every business, regardless of the industry you're in, from retail to healthcare to marketing.

Sendbird’s plugin integration with popular website builders like Wix, Squarespace, and WordPress makes it easy for you to deploy a powerful AI chatbot to your online store.

Shopify ecommerce chatbot

One of the key advantages of Sendbird is its new Shopify ecommerce chatbot. This allows you to automatically train your chatbot on store data so it can learn all the ins and outs of both your brand and your customers without requiring technical expertise. 

The Shopify ecommerce chatbot plugin is powered by your choice of cutting-edge LLMs, such as GPT-4o, Llama 3, Claude 3, and Solar. Your chatbot will be able to provide accurate and personalized recommendations, answer tricky product-related questions, and skillfully assist every customer throughout their shopping journey. Sendbird’s Shopify ecommerce chatbot app is available in the Shopify App Store.

By choosing Sendbird's AI chatbot, you can benefit from a comprehensive, user-friendly, and performance-driven solution that sets you apart from your competition and maximizes online revenue.

• Other features and advantages:

  • Greet, engage, and make personalized recommendations to shoppers

  • Convert browsers into buyers and boost sales

  • Assist shoppers 24/7

  • Respond to questions and offer personalized assistance without hiring live staff

  • Chatbots trained on your business information

  • Prevent shopping cart abandonment

  • Re-engage visitors and build trust to reduce abandonment rates

  • Track effectiveness, monitor interactions, and optimize conversion rates

• Pricing:

  • Free for the first 30 days

  • AI chatbot Starter plan: $99/month — 10,000 message credits per month

  • AI chatbot Pro plan: $499/month — 50,000 message credits per month

  • For feature details for each plan, visit our pricing page.

  • AI chatbot Enterprise: Custom pricing with a high volume of bot messages

2. Chatbase: Best for training a chatbot on your data

Chatbase is an AI-driven chatbot platform that allows companies to develop smart chatbots quickly and easily. You can train the chatbot on your website content or company documents to deliver more precise responses to customer questions. The intuitive interface lets you create chatbots in minutes, and the Chat Logs feature makes it easy to fine-tune the chatbot's replies.

• Features and advantages:

  • Train chatbots on custom data like websites and documents

  • Automatically answer questions about the trained data

  • Easy-to-use interface for quick chatbot creation

  • Chat Logs make it easy to improve answers

  • Integrates with Slack and websites

  • Connects with Zapier and Make for more functionality

• Disadvantages:

  • No integration with live chat

  • Few marketing options

  • Limited ability to create complex chatbot flows

• Pricing:

  • Free tier: 20 message credits per month

  • Hobby: $19/month — 2,000 message credits per month

  • Standard: $99/month — 10,000 message credits per month

  • Unlimited: $399/month — 40,000 message credits per month

3. Botpress: Best for flow builder interface

For businesses seeking a highly customizable customer support chatbot solution, Botpress is an ideal choice. It offers a flow builder for creating bespoke chatbot experiences and also includes an AI that can be trained on your company's data. Notable features include automatic language translation, conversation summaries, and integration with Zendesk and Zapier. Botpress has a usage-based pricing model, so you can align costs with your business needs.

• Features and advantages:

  • Offers AI features such as intents, entities, knowledge base, agents

  • Flexible flow builder for custom chatbots

  • Works with over 10 channels

  • Unlimited variables

  • Customizable website widget

  • Compatible with Zendesk and Zapier

  • Can store unlimited user variables

• Disadvantages:

  • Requires a lot of expertise to master the flow builder

  • Marketing options are basic

  • No integration for ecommerce

  • Standard plans have limited analytics features

  • Some channels require advanced technical know-how for setup

• Pricing:

  • Pay-as-you-go: 2,000 incoming messages and events per month

  • Team: $495/month — 250,000 incoming messages and events per month

  • Custom and Enterprise pricing available

4. ManyChat: Best for beginners

ManyChat is a user-friendly platform for creating chatbots on Meta channels like Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook, as well as SMS and Telegram. It is particularly suitable for beginners, offering an intuitive flow builder and simple integration with Meta services. With ManyChat, you can capture custom user data, customize conversations by applying conditions, select keywords as triggers, send broadcast messages, and attract customers to funnels using growth tools.

• Features and advantages:

  • Offers live chat and Zapier integration

  • Straightforward flow builder

  • Easy integration with multiple messaging platforms

  • Unlimited custom fields and tags

  • Broadcasts, sequences, and rules

  • Tools for guiding customers to funnels

• Disadvantages:

  • Difficulty in creating multilingual chatbots

  • Lacks a built-in AI capability and integrations

• Pricing:

  • Free tier: Basic features to manage 1,000 contacts

  • Pro: $15/month — Scaled pricing depending on the number of contacts

  • Premium: Custom pricing — No price scaling

5. Tidio: Best for small and medium-sized businesses

Tidio is suitable for small to medium-sized businesses interested in offering live chat and AI capabilities on their website. Its user-friendly interface enables the creation of chatbots in minutes, with the ability to transfer chats to live agents when the need arises. The AI can be trained on your own content to improve automatic responses to customer inquiries. Tidio also offers advanced features for direct customer engagement. The platform has a free plan and paid plans that scale with your business.

• Features and advantages:

  • Integrates live chats

  • Offers AI-powered features

  • Enables publishing via web, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and email

  • Drag-and-drop flow builder

  • Unlimited custom user attributes

  • Conditional logic for personalized conversations

• Disadvantages:

  • AI tools are not available in the flow builder

  • Requires Zapier for integration

  • Lacks Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp marketing tools

  • Basic analytics features

• Pricing:

  • Free tier: 50 conversations per month

  • Starter: $29/month — 100 conversations per month

  • Growth: $59/month — 250 conversations per month

  • Tidio+: $749/month — 2,000 conversations per month

  • Enterprise: $2,999/month — Unlimited conversations per month

6. Chatfuel: Best for Meta services such as WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook Messenger

Chatfuel is a high-profile platform for deploying chatbots on Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook. Among its features, it offers a straightforward flow builder, the ability to collect custom user data, a variety of growth tools to increase chatbot engagement, integrated live chat, and analytics to help with performance optimization.

• Features and advantages:

  • Multichannel publishing to Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp

  • User-friendly flow builder interface

  • Custom user fields

  • Live chat integration

  • Connects with Make, Zapier, and ChatGPT

  • Built-in marketing tools for Meta platforms

  • Analytics for improving chatbot responses

• Disadvantages:

  • Challenges in creating multilingual chatbots

  • Inability to duplicate flows across multiple channels

  • No website chat widget

• Pricing:

  • Facebook & Instagram Business: $14.99/month — 1000 conversations per month

  • Facebook & Instagram Enterprise: $300/month — tailored plan

  • WhatsApp Business: $34.99/month — 1,000 conversations per month

  • WhatsApp Enterprise: $300/month — tailored plan

7. Chatbot.com: Best for training on multiple data sources

Chatbot.com is an option for small to medium-sized businesses seeking a website chatbot solution. It offers the ability to gather user data, AI, a straightforward flow builder, conditional logic, live chat, proactive messaging, and training analytics, making it a powerful yet user-friendly platform.

• Features and advantages:

  • Live chat

  • Custom user fields

  • AI knowledge base, entities, and intents capabilities

  • Training feature for improving chatbot responses

  • Deploys chatbots to the web, Facebook, and Slack

  • Straightforward flow builder

  • Proactive messaging

  • Native website widget

• Disadvantages:

  • Doesn’t offer Facebook marketing

  • Lacks a comprehensive overview of flows

  • Lacks broadcast capability

• Pricing:

  • Starter: $52/month — 1,000 chats per month

  • Team: $142/month — 5,000 chats per month

  • Business: $424/month — 2,5000 chats per month

  • Enterprise: Custom pricing plan

8. SnatchBot: Best for multichannel messaging

SnatchBot is a versatile tool for creating multichannel customer support chatbots, although it has a steeper learning curve than some other platforms, it offers a variety of customization features. With SnatchBot, you can create chatbots with custom fields, send broadcasts to targeted segments, leverage keywords and AI, and deploy across more than 10 channels. However, it lacks some Facebook marketing features.

• Features and advantages:

  • Highly customizable development options

  • Broadcast messages and apply conditional logic

  • Accepts payments

  • Integrated AI and NLP capabilities

  • Publishes to more than 10 channels

  • Analytics for performance evaluation

  • Integration with external systems (CRMs and databases)

  • Pre-configured templates

  • Live chat integration

• Disadvantages:

  • Less intuitive user interface compared to other platforms

  • Lacks advanced Facebook marketing tools

  • Difficulty in creating chatbots in multiple languages

• Pricing:

  • Free: 2,000 messages per account

  • Starter: $99/month — 10,000 messages

  • Team: $199/month — 25,000 messages

  • Business: $449/month — 75,000 messages

  • Enterprise: Custom pricing

Top 6 reasons to implement an ecommerce chatbot

Leveraging an ecommerce chatbot delivers a wide array of positive outcomes for both businesses and customers. Let's take a look at the most significant benefits of implementing a new ecommerce AI chatbot.

1. Enhanced customer engagement

Ecommerce chatbots enable businesses to engage in real-time dialogue with every customer, providing immediate, relevant, and consistent responses and highly targeted recommendations. For example, a chatbot on a fashion retailer's website can ask each customer about their current style preferences, budget, and occasion, and then suggest outfits that will satisfy their particular needs in an instant. This creates a compelling and fine-tuned shopping experience, making customers feel appreciated and more willing to make a purchase.

2. 24/7 customer support

Ecommerce AI chatbots provide round-the-clock customer support without any need for human supervision. Customers receive instantaneous assistance at any time, day or night, without having to wait for a human employee to become available. This 24/7 availability noticeably improves customer satisfaction, as shoppers can get their questions answered and issues resolved within seconds.

3. Improved efficiency and cost savings

By automating repetitive tasks, such as providing information about product features, shipping policies, or return procedures, new ecommerce chatbots can dramatically lighten the workload for customer service teams and free them up to focus on more challenging and nuanced issues. This improved operational efficiency converts into real cost savings, as you can make the most of your personnel and drive down labor expenses.

4. Streamlined order management

Chatbots can help customers with order tracking, modifications, returns, and refunds through simple, conversational interactions. For example, a customer can ask a chatbot, “Where is my order?” and it will quickly reply with the current order status and estimated delivery date. If a customer needs to modify or cancel an order, the chatbot can walk them through the process, reducing frustration.

5. Valuable data collection and analysis

As chatbots engage with customers, they can collect valuable data such as preferences, demographics, and behavioral insights. Analyzing this information helps you gain a deeper understanding of your customers, enabling you to enhance your products, services, and marketing strategies. For instance, if a chatbot notices that many customers are asking about a specific product feature, you can use this information to improve product descriptions, recommend products, target marketing campaigns, or tweak designs.

6. Increased conversion rates

An ecommerce AI chatbot can help customers find the perfect product, answer any questions they may have, and even offer incentives like discounts or free shipping to encourage them to finalize their purchase. By supporting customers throughout their journey and removing potential barriers to purchase, chatbots can effectively increase conversion rates and bring in sales.

Trust Sendbird to build your ecommerce AI chatbot

To maximize the benefits of ecommerce chatbots, it’s important to implement chatbots for ecommerce strategically, follow best practices, and continuously monitor and optimize their performance. This approach will help you improve customer satisfaction, drive conversions, and stay ahead in a constantly evolving digital marketplace.

It’s also crucial to remember that chatbots should enhance, not replace, human interaction. By balancing machine intelligence with the human touch, you can ensure your customers receive the support they need while continuing to nurture genuine relationships.

To experience the benefits of Sendbird's ecommerce chatbot solution firsthand, start a free trial or contact us to learn more about how we can help your business thrive in the age of AI.