AI Chatbots in eCommerce Automation: 12 Strategies and Benefits

An e-commerce company involves hundreds of processes including setting up your store, optimizing it, gathering customers, accepting orders, delivering them, processing the data, formulating strategies, and offering customer support. 

These many processes involve multiple associates and employees and the investment of many labor hours for a smooth operation and sustenance of your e-commerce store. As your business upscales, this can get even more daunting. In such a case, you would want certain methods to facilitate these processes in your e-commerce business. 

These long processes in your e-commerce business can easily be automated with the help of AI chatbots. 91% of marketers claim an automation software is essential for your eCommerce business.

In this article, let us see what chatbot automation is and how it can be used for your eCommerce store. Additionally, we’ll see the benefits and different ways they can be used to automate your store. 

What is eCommerce Automation and How Do AI Chatbots Help It?

As your business upscales, the data collected, the processes involved, and their complexity tend to go up. This will involve human laborers working hours upon hours or a multitude of resources to facilitate the processes. eCommerce automation is the concept of automating the processes in your e-commerce pipeline using machine learning and AI technologies. They can support multiple tasks and work on them efficiently, with minimal to no human intervention. This eases the workload on the employees and improves your workflow’s efficiency. 

eCommerce automation is facilitated with the help of software and chatbots to reach its full potential. Employing AI chatbots in your eCommerce store can help you focus on more important tasks such as: formulating marketing strategies, ensuring the stability of the workforce, and experimenting with new processes. All these tasks will require human creativity and effort, leaving the chatbot to take care of repetitive tasks.

Different Ways AI Chatbots Help eCommerce Automation

AI chatbots can be utilized in a variety of ways that can aid your e-commerce store. Some ways that chatbots can help your eCommerce store are:

Gather Feedback Automatically

Feedback is an integral element for a growing and evolving eCommerce store, and collecting it from users without sounding too spammy has always been a challenging task. AI chatbots can easily parse through this task by automating the feedback workflow and connecting with the user. 

AI chatbots can prompt the user to provide feedback about the product subtly, either on the website itself or through an automated follow-up email. In addition to the manual reviews, chatbots can also be made to gather feedback using polls or survey forms. 

Thus feedback provides you with insights into your customer expectations which help formulate better strategies and in turn, increase your conversions. 

Handle Negative Reviews

Negative reviews tend to leave a hit on your company’s reputation. Learning how to handle them can help your brand. 

When a customer leaves a negative review, the chatbot makes sure to follow up with the user and get a detailed review from them. You can then get to the bottom of this issue and assure the user you will solve the problem.

AI chatbots help you automate this process by making sure to respond to customer complaints. In addition to showing interest in solving the problem, chatbots can be made to send e-mails regarding the issue and automatically create a support ticket to resolve the issue. 

Segment Users

There might be different types of users coming to your e-commerce site and disparate customer segments each needing a different approach to engage and convert them to customers. Manually getting this task can be very arduous. 

By using AI chatbots for your e-commerce store, you can segment and tag the user and devise a unique marketing strategy for different users.

Chatbots can tag and segment user data based on their activity, products visited, products ordered, gender, location, and other defining attributes. 

Chatbots can deliver different prompts, use different conversational tones, show various offers, and understand and direct customers through the sales funnel to make conversions. 

Manage Your Inventory

Inventory management is one of the most important parts of your supply chain process. Managing your inventory is especially necessary as it helps your e-commerce processes function without disruptions and makes sure the products are available for both the manufacturer and your customer. 

AI chatbots can help automate your inventory management by notifying you about the status of the available stock and helping reorder automatically when quantities fall below a set threshold. More importantly, this aids in minimal wastage of goods, ensuring products are not overstocked or understocked.

This helps the customer find the right product, notify the owner what products are out of stock and even trigger a notification to the user when a product is back in stock.

Automatically Nurture and Qualify Leads

AI chatbots are well-known for their expertise in customer engagement by connecting with the user and building a personalized rapport with them. This attribute can also be helpful when gathering and nurturing leads. 

Chatbots help your e-commerce store by identifying the lead and engaging them with quality content such as surveys, polls, fillable forms, stats, case studies, and offers, generally via email. With the nurtured lead, chatbots can either pass the data to the sales team or schedule meetings and appointments automatically. 

With potential leads, better engagement, and satisfied customers, the conversion rates and revenue of your e-commerce store also go up.

Schedule Tasks

There are certain peak hours in different time zones where customer interaction might be at maximum. Sharing content and publishing posts during this window can be an ideal condition to accomplish a wider reach. But, a manual workforce might not be available all the time to publish your posts or send prompts to customers based on time zones. This is due to the fact that chatbots can collect data based on time, and with this data, they can ascertain the peak interaction periods for any time zone. 

With the help of chatbots, you can easily schedule tasks to be done in the stipulated time. They can specifically be made to publish social media posts and content like blogs and newsletters on your websites. 

This helps save a lot of time and track and streamline your e-commerce process. 

Streamline Company Communications

Chatbots can notify team members, stakeholders, and even clients regarding the processes in your e-commerce store. They can also establish any information or notifications over multiple platforms and channels like Trello, Asana, ClickUp, or Slack. 

Chatbots can assist internal communication between employees in terms of task delegation, task completion, and the status of a process. 

Proper communication between teams upholds transparency and establishes an end-to-end process without any errors or disruptions in the supply process or on the customer front.

Benefits of Using AI Chatbots in eCommerce Automation

There are a variety of benefits your AI chatbots offer for your eCommerce store. Some are:

Helps with Customer Retention

Chatbots help customer retention by answering the user’s questions, showing personalized products, messages, and prompts, and displaying product offers. They can also attend to any issues relating to the product, payment, and delivery.

A satisfied, loyal customer base can greatly upscale your profit and help cut down the marketing costs involved to acquire new customers. 

Abandoned Cart Notifications

According to research by Baymard Institute, 70% of shopping carts are abandoned.

Most customers abandon their shopping carts due to shipping costs, delays in shipping dates, and price comparison with other stores without checking them out. Chatbots can be used to send notifications or mail regarding abandoned shopping carts. 

This helps bring the user back to your website and provides another opportunity for your chatbot to engage with the user and guide them in their shopping journey.

Send Notifications and Reminders

Notifications and reminders are a great way to spark the customer’s curiosity and grab their attention. 

Using chatbots, you can send a variety of prompts and notifications based on the user’s preferences regarding new product arrivals, new discounts, and offers on products and reorder any perishable goods.

Help Save Time and Effort

eCommerce stores encompass a lot of processes and some tasks might need a lot of effort. Automating your tasks using AI chatbots acts more like an auto-pilot for your eCommerce store.

Automating your e-commerce store helps cull the time taken to complete the task and reduces the manual labor involved in it, especially with dull repetitive tasks. 

Cross-Platform Assist

As your eCommerce store grows, customers come in to access your store through a variety of channels. Manually engaging customers over multiple channels might require a lot of manpower. Also, keeping track of the data and showing personalized preferences based on them can be a bit arduous.

Integrating chatbots across multiple platforms can help cross-platform engagement and keep track of the data to showcase the right prompts, messages, and products based on user behavior. 

Related Reads:

9 Ways Chatbots Can Skyrocket eCommerce Conversion Rates
5 Industries in Rapid Change Because of AI Technology
AI In E-Commerce: Using Technology To Boost Your Business

Frequently Asked Questions

What is eCommerce automation?

eCommerce automation refers to the concept of using machines, devices, or chatbots to perform certain tasks using certain logic and conditions. The processes can range from the procurement of the product and delivering the product to providing after-support services.

What are some benefits of automating processes in your e-commerce store?

Automating the processes in your e-commerce store using AI chatbots can help you save time and labor on repetitive tasks, provide cross-platform assistance, multilingual support, and engage customers and retain them. 

Closing Thoughts

Automating your business using digital technologies is becoming a norm across a variety of sectors. AI chatbots can be utilized in a variety of ways from streamlining processes and automating workflow to engaging customers and driving conversions. Therefore, the more the processes are automated, the easier it can be to manage your operations.

So, it only makes sense to have a chatbot at the helm of your digital marketing to grow your business.