How to Create an E-commerce Chatbot? (Step by Step)

Have you ever left any e-commerce website because of poor response rates or bad communication? Well, most of us have. Since there are way too many alternatives available these days, if you can’t access any particular type of e-commerce website, you move on to the other. Think of this situation from a business perspective. Indeed, leaving one e-commerce website means it affects their traffic, customer engagement and overall revenue.

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If you have an e-commerce website and don’t want such situations to occur, it’s high time you learn how to create an e-commerce chatbot. In a press release, Gartner reveals that chatbots will be the primary customer service channel for a quarter of organizations by 2027. This means if you still don’t consider implementing chatbots in your e-commerce business, you stay laid back and watch all your competitors grow.

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Again, if you consider Gen Z shoppers, they prefer connecting with chatbots over human resources as the former gives instant replies. Since Gen Z shoppers want everything quick, 60% of them prefer speedy and convenient services by chatbots over human agents. In this blog, we will help you with how to create an ecommerce chatbot, the planning of an e-commerce chatbot strategy, along the common mistakes to avoid.

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Planning your e-commerce chatbot strategy

The success of your e-commerce chatbot lies in how well you plan it. After all, everything requires creating a solid blueprint. Nowadays, an e-commerce chatbot is no longer restricted to simply helping customers with instant replies and workforce automation. Rather, it has to be aligned with your customer needs, recent technological advancements, your e-commerce business objectives and tracking performances.

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1. Define primary goals

The first and foremost step of creating an e-commerce chatbot lies in identifying the core business objectives for implementing the chatbot. These objectives will determine the functionality of the chatbot, its tone and its integration. For this, ask these questions to yourself:

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• Do you want to automate customer support?

• Do you wish your customers to reap benefits from loyalty programs and post-purchase support?

• Can chatbots improve e-commerce sales? 

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The course of action for creating the chatbot will be determined by the goal you set. For example, if your primary concern is to generate sales, your chatbot should be able to suggest better product recommendations to the customer. It should also focus more on offering better customer service. 

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2. Map use cases to the customer journey

Depending on the buyer journey, every customer has a different emotion for your e-commerce brand. Consider yourself as a prospective customer of an e-commerce brand. Will you buy any product from an e-commerce brand you’ve stepped into for the first time? Certainly not. This is where mapping the customer journey is crucial, 

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• Discovery phase: Shower customers or visitors with new product categories and trending items.

• Decision-making phase: Show customers some product comparisons, reviews and stock availability.

• Purchase phase: Help customers with the entire purchase process and assist them with payment options.

• Post-purchase phase: Track orders and send notifications on the status of the orders. 

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Once you align your chatbot with the buyer journey, it can deliver better value to your customers. The more value your customers receive, the more loyal they become. This means you have to ensure that your chatbot has thoughtful and not robotic interactions

3. Choose channels based on audience

Do all your customers hang out on the same platform? Well, your target audience is expanded and can be on multiple platforms. To capture the audience’s attention, you need to create a chatbot that easily integrates with your e-commerce brand’s mobile apps, websites, social media channels and email. 

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• Are your target audience heavily reliant on mobile devices?

• Do your potential customers browse the web often?

• Is your audience more active on Instagram and Facebook?

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Let’s consider an example here. Think of the Gen Z customers. They always like assistance over DMs, especially on platforms like Instagram and Facebook. But your older audience prefers web chats. So, depending on the customers, choose a platform through which you can reach out to them more and enhance engagement. 

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4. Identify KPIs to measure success

Want improvement in building relationships with your customers? Measure the performance and growth of the e-commerce chatbots. To understand how well the chatbot performs, establish quantifiable and clear KPIs depending on your business goals. Ask yourself: 

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• How many visitors chat with the chatbot?

• How many visitors leave the website without purchasing?

• How many requests can the chatbot handle daily?

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For example, when you notice that your users are leaving your e-commerce platform because of a difficulty in check-out flow, you instantly know that you have to simplify the flow of conversations in the chatbot. These insights and measures regularly keep your chatbot updated. 

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Step-by-Step: How to Build Your E-commerce Chatbot Using

Now that you have a blueprint of your e-commerce chatbot ready at hand, it’s time to get into the real game Building the e-commerce chatbot from scratch. You must be thinking about finding a reliable chatbot builder platform, as there are way too many available in the market. However, not all of them can be trusted. But as long as you have Copilot.Live, you need not worry. 

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As a powerful AI-integrated chatbot-building platform, Copilot.Live helps you build your own AI agents for complete shopping assistance. Even if your target customers are all over the place, Copilot.Live allows your e-commerce chatbot to get integrated with the website, emails, WhatsApp, Slack and AI voice calls. The chatbot proactively converts interests into opportunities, thereby helping your business with lead generation. 

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Further, Copilot.Live escalates your customers to human support in a hands-free way. We understand how your brand craves to build a personality of its own. With the chatbot deployed by Copilot. Live, you can align your brand’s style with a human-generated tone. Above all, creating the AI agent is only a matter of three steps - create an AI agent, train the AI agent and deploy your AI agent. Voila! Your e-commerce chatbot is ready. It’s time to delve deep into the steps you should follow to prepare your e-commerce chatbot using Copilot.Live.

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Step 1: Signing up

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First and foremost, sign in Copilot.Live with all the necessary details asked for. It is completely free. Once you’ve signed in, Copilot.Live will offer you a detailed dashboard with all the customization options. The menus include an overview, configuration, inbox, data sources, deploys, workforce and integration.

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Step 2: Write effective scripts

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The basic structure of your chatbot is ready. Now, you need to feed it with the appropriate words to make it function accordingly. Go to the ‘Configuration’ tab and add the basic information. Next, choose the chatbot appearance according to your brand personality. Add the welcome message in the ‘Welcome Settings’ tab. Select the voice, sound and language in which you want the chatbot to communicate. Finally, add the database of your e-commerce website to the chatbot.

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Step 3: Design conversational flows

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This is where the real magic happens. In fact, this is the deciding factor of whether your chatbot will rule in your niche-specific industry. Add relevant conversational flows that your target audience might ask or have trouble with. Make sure to connect the dots between the user and your e-commerce chatbot by setting conditional logic.

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Step 4: Integrate with store

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From where will the chatbot get all the data about your e-commerce store? For this, you have to integrate the chatbot with the backend of your e-commerce store. You get native integrations in Copilot.Live with engaging platforms like Magento, Shopify, WooCommerce and BigCommerce. After integration, the chatbot can extract live data right from the store. To track conversations and sync with different customer information, Copilot.Live connects chatbots with payment gateways, CRM tools and email marketing tools.

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Step 5: Train/configure

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Indeed, there are several e-commerce chatbots available in the market. If you have to chatbot stay ahead of the curve, you need to make it smarter than your competitors. Here, Copilot.Live helps you to train and configure the chatbot via NLP or Natural Language Processing. This helps your e-commerce chatbot understand the customer intent and improve accuracy.

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Step 6: Deploy the chatbot

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Finally, deploy the e-commerce chatbot in the respective e-commerce platform. Coplot.Live allows your e-commerce chatbot to deploy in other platforms like standalone web pages for direct user engagement, web widgets for on-site user engagement, WhatsApp for direct user messaging and AI-based calls.

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Step 7: Test and optimize

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Although your e-commerce chatbot is now live, you can still monitor its performance and continue to optimize it. For performance monitoring, check the detailed analytics on user drop-off points, most frequent queries, unrecognized questions, and conversion funnel performance. To compare different messaging styles and conversation flows, conduct A/B testing and look for customer feedback.

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Things to Avoid While Building an E-Commerce Chatbot

Everyone wants a chatbot that performs perfectly like a human assistant. But how do you achieve this? Well, you’ll find a lot of e-commerce websites with chatbots. But not all of them are great. This is because most e-commerce platforms overlook some of the common errors. Here are the common e-commerce chatbot-building mistakes you must avoid:

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1. Over-automation

When you implement a chatbot in your e-commerce website, you certainly want it to automate the entire business process from the beginning to the end. Even though you think this is useful, often users find it frustrating. This frustration occurs mostly when the chatbot fails to understand a conversation context. It automatically pushes the user to conduct long scripted conversations. This leads to poor results as the chatbot prevents the customer from reaching out to a human agent at ease.  

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2. No human fallback

Generally, when users have a critical query, they prefer to talk to a human agent. However, often, users have a complaint about facing difficulty in reaching out to human resources via a chatbot. The moment your e-commerce chatbot traps your users within a dead end, it invites trouble for the user. That is when your chatbot fails to prove its worth. This raises a question about your e-commerce chatbot’s efficiency and effectiveness. 

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3. Robotic tone

Your chatbot may have the perfect functionality and features. However, it may still fail to capture the tone and style of your e-commerce brand. This makes the communications with your e-commerce chatbot appear robotic and cold. Remember, your customers prefer an e-commerce chatbot that communicates with the users in a friendly manner rather than one that behaves like a machine. In a report by PwC, researchers found that 59% of people walk away from an e-commerce chatbot after encountering several bad experiences. 

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4. Ignoring analytics

Building an e-commerce chatbot is just the tip of the iceberg. The betterment of the chatbot relies on how well you track its performance and monitor it. Often, e-commerce brands deploy a chatbot and forget it, thinking that their job is done. This is how you fail to notice the areas of growth and improvement in the chatbot. Paying attention to the performance of the chatbot means more improved automation and customer experience. 

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5. Poor updates and maintenance

Do you believe that building a chatbot for your e-commerce business is more of a ‘done-and-dusted’ task? Well, in that case, be ready to face complaints from the users. Understand that your e-commerce chatbot needs to be updated at regular intervals. The moment your customers find that the e-commerce chatbot is coming up with outdated responses, the customer switches to your competitors. Ultimately, you lose business. 

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Advanced Features to Explore for Better Performance

Considering the benefits of e-commerce chatbots, you ought to learn more about the advanced features that you can accommodate within the chatbot. Since e-commerce chatbots are here to stay, accommodating them with advanced features makes them more likely to be readily accepted by customers.

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These are some of the advanced features of e-commerce chatbots that will rule the industry in the upcoming days:

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• Offering more personalization - What’s the one way to get into the minds of your customers? Simple. You can do it by providing them with what they are looking for. How to do that? Collect user data. In the upcoming days, your customers will stay loyal to your e-commerce brand only if you can offer them what they want. This means your chatbot has to recommend products that your customers are looking for.

• Voice search - You have to understand the busy schedule of your users now. Nobody has ample time to type and search for products in your e-commerce store. Besides, if your product catalog is massive, searching for the right products becomes more challenging. Here, your chatbot needs a proper voice search integration so that it can figure out what users are looking for only by deciphering phrases and names of products.

• Visual product search - Similar to voice search, the chatbots are now being integrated with a visual product search feature as well to help customers with better and more accurate responses. Here, through the visual search integration, the user uploads a picture of a product. The chatbot then understands the product and figures out what the user is looking for. Finally, it shows a similar range of products to the customer.

• Multilingual support - I’m sure you want your e-commerce chatbot to reach your target audience or potential customers globally. Now, think of the language barrier the global audience may face if your chatbot cannot communicate with them in their native language. To prevent this, e-commerce chatbots are now being featured with multilingual support. This means your users can communicate with the chatbot in their native language and resolve their queries.

• CRM integration - Finally, another significant advanced feature of e-commerce chatbots these days is CRM integration. Ever wondered how the chatbot will understand your product category? It is through this CRM integration feature that the chatbot can be added to your product catalog and existing CRM database.

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Measuring Your E-Commerce Chatbot’s Success

Your work doesn’t end when you launch a chatbot. Rather, it opens doors to a lot of opportunities that your e-commerce brand can avail of only if you improve its performance from time to time. To do this, the only solution is to measure the success of your e-commerce chatbot. These five key performance indicators can evaluate the success of your e-commerce chatbot:

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• Engagement and completion rate - This measures the number of users who have interacted with the chatbot. It also determines the number of users who have finished the conversational flow. When you see more users completing the chat, it means they are getting the desired value.

• Deflected support tickets - This ensures the number of queries your e-commerce chatbot successfully resolves without the intervention of any human support. The high deflection rate of your chatbot means a reduced human workforce.

• Bot-assisted conversions - This indicates the number of purchases users have made only after interacting with your e-commerce chatbot. This conversion can be either guiding a customer or helping him with a discount code.

• Customer satisfaction scores - The customer satisfaction scores take the feedback from the customers post-purchase. This gives an overall experience of the effectiveness of the chatbot.

• Revenue impact - This takes into account the revenue you’ve attributed to customer interaction with the chatbot. It represents the actual ROI of the chatbot in your overall sales funnel.

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Top 3 Brands That Have Implemented E-commerce Chatbots

Since e-commerce chatbots have now become pivotal to improving customer engagement and driving sales, many major e-commerce brands have now embraced the technology. Here are the three leading e-commerce brands that have successfully integrated AI chatbots into their platforms:

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1. Amazon 

The chatbot introduced by Amazon named Rufus was launched in the early days of 2024 as a virtual shopping assistant to customers. The primary purpose of introducing Rufus on Amazon is to help customers find the necessary products at their fingertips without much hassle. With time, the chatbot has contributed to a significant increase in the financial growth of Amazon. Researchers forecast that by 2027, Rufus will help Amazon reach $1.2 billion in downstream impact profit contributions. Looking at this, the company plans to roll out to at least 13 more international markets soon.

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2. GoFynd

GoFynd has an interactive chatbot named Fify that welcomes you with a warm message (‘Hey there! How can I help you today?’). Further, the chatbot suggests a few questions that users normally ask. Recently, GoFynd was providing a sale of 60% discount on selected products. I asked the chatbot to recommend some products to create a cool summer look. Immediately, the chatbot showed me a list of products. Soon, I created a fashionable summer look and bought the preferred products.

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3. Nike

Strategically, Nike has integrated generative AI and machine learning to create a chatbot that transforms customer experience, designs customized products and improves operational efficiency. What makes Nike’s chatbot one in a million is its super engaging virtual try-on feature. I tried it for a pair of shoes, and the suggestions were apt, completely according to my choice. Further, the chatbot also suggested a few apparel to create a complete look.

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Conclusion

Therefore, AI e-commerce chatbots are no longer a fashionable asset to your e-commerce business. Rather, they are now an essential tool to help your customers get the best experience. Right from offering product discovery to boosting conversations, these chatbots stand as an integral part of all areas of the e-commerce business.

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As you’ve checked the examples, it’s time to develop a personalized chatbot for your e-commerce business and give it a new edge. I hope the steps mentioned here on how to create an e-commerce chatbot will help you build one for your e-commerce brand. I’ve also added Copilot.Live as the best platform to build an e-commerce chatbot. So, start building your chatbot today and embrace automation now.