Nowadays business is no longer about old-school style of communication: like reading newspaper ad, watching TV commercial or even making a call to customer support. Today, in rapidly growing ecommerce industry companies tried to step up to the next level and users expect much more. That’s why live chat software for ecommerce has become so popular among customers and businesses.
I know it can be very important to make your customers feel that you’re right there with them and will gladly help them out whenever and wherever possible. However, the truth is that not all of you have the time to deal with all of your inquiries, especially those that require a very quick answer. This is where live chat software for ecommerce comes in handy! Whether you are looking for a system that works alongside your existing website or you need a new solution that offers you more features, live chat is the way to go.
Looking for the best live chat software for ecommerce? We’ve covered a wide range of solutions in this list. You can find free and paid options that support small businesses, medium businesses, and huge ecommerce enterprises. Plus, you’ll see live chat software options that are both self-hosted and cloud-based.
Increase sales and make your site easier to use by installing live chat. Help customers in real time, convert more shoppers into buyers, and create happy customer advocates with the most robust and easy to use live chat software for ecommerce.
What features should you look for in live chat software for eCommerce?
Depending on the size and nature of your store, here are some of the things live chat software for eCommerce should be able to do:
- Initiate a conversation proactively at different points in the sales journey
- Create triggers for upselling a product
- Share files to enable sending screenshots, catalogs, or offers between agents and customers
- Include pre-chat forms for stats and lead generation, and post-chat surveys for customer feedback
- Reduce cart abandonment by connecting with customers if they’re having problems
- Use canned responses and sneak peek facility for quicker response
- Transfer chats among agents with internal comments
- Access chat transcripts for personalized attention
- Add tags to chats for context. This helps with analytics by filtering using tags
- Keep track of sales and service team, sales and goal tracking
- Include detailed analytics to give you insight into customer information
- Use chat engaging features like a popup chat window, chat buttons, eye-catchers
- Set up audio and visual notifications of chat or message, so no customer is kept waiting
LiveChat
LiveChat covers a lot of ground when it comes to customer support. Surely it ranks among the top live chat software for eCommerce.
Pricing
Though LiveChat doesn’t offer any free plans, it allows a 30-day free trial (exclusive offer). The Starter plan costs you $16/seat/month and the Team plan costs $33/seat/month (billed annually). Additionally, you can also choose from Business and Enterprise plans.
However, to access the dedicated eCommerce features, you’ll want at least the Team plan.
What are the best eCommerce features?
- 170+ integrations such as Shopify, Facebook Messenger, and UPS Delivery status
- Chat monitoring and chat transfer
- Two-way file sharing between agents and customers
- Filterable chat tags
- Canned responses
- Sneak peek
- Tracking eCommerce goals/ sales targets
- Pre-chat and post-chat survey forms
- Chat history that’s filterable
- Offline ticket form
- Extensive reporting and analysis
- Dedicated WordPress plugin for WooCommerce stores
This is the best live chat software for:
LiveChat covers a wide range of features and plans to suit different budgets. The goals and sales tracker, file sharing, analytics, and lead generation make it particularly suitable for eCommerce websites. What makes it more attractive is that on one license, you can add the chat widget to as many websites or apps as you want.
Tidio Chat
Tidio Chat comes with a host of features that can be useful to your eCommerce website, including a Shopify chatbot. It’s a fine option, especially if you’re looking for AI smarts to sub in for agents.
Pricing
A free forever plan that supports three operators, any number of chats, and chatbots. However, it’s not entirely a free ride. For the premium features, you’ll need to choose from the Chatbots or Communicator Plan ($18 each per month). There’s also a Mailing Plan ($10/mo) for email communications and campaigns.
What are the best eCommerce features?
- Sneak preview and live visitors monitoring (Premium)
- New incoming visitor notification (Premium)
- Chatbot templates (Premium)
- Easy-to-set automated messages targeting visitors based on activity type
- Unlimited chatting with chatbots with up to 100 unique visitors per month
- Integration with apps like Facebook Messenger, Zapier, and Shopify
- Dedicated WordPress plugin for WooCommerce stores
- Store visitor info such as tags, location, preferences, and more
- Email response for offline queries
- Up to 500 automated and scheduled emails per month
This is the best live chat software for:
Ecommerce websites that don’t want to spend on live chat services. The forever free plan offers all the basic services to cover small and even some mid-sized businesses. Besides, it offers most of the essential chat services at the best prices. And, you can add it to multiple websites, too.
Olark
Olark makes it really easy for you to talk to customers. Their chat tools help you to learn and improve from every online interaction.
Pricing
Olark offers a very limited free plan that lets you have up to 20 chats per month with limited features.
After that, paid plans start at $29/month/seat – you can also save money if you choose a longer billing term.
Olark also has optional “PowerUps” that are an extra monthly fee. For example, to add co-browsing, you’ll pay an extra $99 per month.
What are the best eCommerce features?
- Collects visitor details like location and device, maintains visitor history
- Chat transfers
- Chat transcripts
- File sharing
- Chat tagging for analytic purposes
- Automatically add chat events to Google Analytics
- Organize chat agents into departments and monitor activity
- Pre and post-chat survey
- Chat routing
- Canned responses
- Automate chat greeting, chat initiation on triggers
- Automate chatbox behavior based on visitor behavior
- Chat agent user roles – basic access and administrative access
- Enable desktop notifications of new chats
- Integration with Zendesk, Salesforce, Magento, BigCommerce and more
- Dedicated WordPress plugin for WooCommerce stores
- Add-ons for co-browsing, removing ‘Olark’ branding, and visitor insights into social and professional profiles
This is the best live chat software for:
Olark is well-suited for any business looking to grow since it helps to capture leads, increase sales, and provide support. You can use it on any number of domains as well.
HubSpot
HubSpot’s live chat feature embeds with your website to enhance customer support and the corresponding conversion process.
HubSpot’s live chat tool lets you set up targeted messages for different pages or segments of your audience. If no one can respond immediately, you can enable an email capture form so your visitors can get in touch. You can also set up a chatbot to personalize your conversations at scale. Because it’s built on top of the free HubSpot CRM, you’ll know exactly who you’re chatting with and what pages they viewed on your website, be it a prospect, long time customer, or new contact. This makes for an excellent customer experience. You can take notes, send emails, make calls, schedule follow-up tasks, and create support tickets in one place, making following up an absolute breeze for your team
You can tweak its widget based on your brand’s overall outlook, and then set up various chat messages to target specific audience profiles. Consequently, you’ll be able to engage the most valuable warm leads.
And while you focus on the most critical chats, you can leverage HubSpot’s bot feature to automatically handle things like answering standard queries, booking meetings, and qualifying leads.
Pricing: It’s a free feature offered as part of the free HubSpot CRM (read our HubSpot CRM review).
Live Chat is included with the Free HubSpot CRM. However, you can upgrade to a paid account to get access to more advanced functionalities such as if/then workflows and transferring chats to different team members.
Who is this best for:
HubSpot Live Chat is ideal for small to mid-sized companies and teams on a budget and who want to get set up quickly. HubSpot live chat easily integrates with WordPress, Shopify, and more so you can connect with your visitors at scale.
LiveAgent
LiveAgent is another well-known app perfect for companies in search of helpdesk and support solutions. If you want to improve your approach to customer service and make things a bit more interesting for your staff at the same time, LiveAgent can help. This solution makes it quick and easy to monitor crucial support stats, assess things like answers per hour, and more.
You can also allow your agents to earn a variety of badges and rewards though an automation system for their work. There are various awards associated with this live chat software, including awards for quickest response on social media, and making the most weekly pauses.
LiveAgent is a fun alternative to some of the standard solutions available on the market for customer service and live chat today. If you’re looking for a live chat software that can integrate with tools like Slack, Facebook, and Twitter, and you want your technology to be a bit fun, then this could be the option for you. There’s even the option to download mobile apps where your pro customer service agents can monitor information.
Pricing: Pricing for LiveAgent starts at around $39 per user per month. It might not be ideal for companies in search of free live chat, but it’s a good way to track all kinds of SMS and chat history for a decent price.
Who is this Best for:
LiveAgent is a good choice if you want to upgrade your customer satisfaction strategy while gamifying the experience for your customer service representatives? Any small business or company that wants to experiment with gamification will love this tool.
ChatBot
ChatBots are the future of live chat software because they allow you to engage with your customers 24/7.
ChatBot.com makes it easy for small businesses to use the power of artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots to boost customer engagement and overall customer satisfaction with a self-service help interface.
It comes with an intuitive drag and drop interface that you can use to create your own ChatBot. They also have dozens of ready-made templates for various industries that makes it easy for you to design custom conversation scenarios and chat routing that fits your business needs.
For example, you can use the eCommerce bot template to help walk the customers through the entire buying process. You can use the lead generation bot to power-up your sales and book calls. Their sales bot template allows you to sell products directly from the chat window which is a really powerful feature for making sales from social media profiles.
Their other bot templates include customer service bot, restaurant bot, package tracking bot, coffee shop bot, recruitment bot, and many more. Chatbot templates are truly one of the best parts about this platform because it levels the playing field for small businesses. Previously making chatbots were hard for small business, but this makes it easy.
Simply put, ChatBot.com allows you to add a virtual assistant for your websites, facebook pages, and messaging apps. If the user wishes to communicate with a real person, then you can seamlessly forward them to your customer support agent, Facebook messenger, phone call support, or one of their many other live chat tools integrations.
ChatBot also integrates seamlessly with WordPress and WooCommerce.
We use ChatBot.com to power our various chat bot on our eCommerce websites.
Pricing: ChatBot has various plans for businesses of all sizes. Their starter plan starts for $50 per month which gives you access to 1000 chats per month (essentially $0.01 / chat). Each plan comes with a 14 day free trial.
Why Add Live Chat Support to Your Website?
According to eConsultancy, live chat has the highest satisfaction levels of any customer service channel at 73%, compared to 61% for email and 44% for phone.
It is a no brainer that live chat feature has such a significant impact on online sales and marketing. It allows customers to get instant answers without leaving your website. A positive live chat experience can effectively help customer make the buying decision.
Adding live chat support is proven to reduce cart abandonment, increase sales, and boost conversion rates. But a lot of it depends on the live chat software that you use.
A poor live chat customer experience can have an adverse impact. You can lose sales, customers may leave with a bad impression of your brand, you may end up paying too much for the service, or fail to utilize the live chat platform due to technical skills.
Basically, you want to find an affordable live chat service, that is easy to use, works with WordPress or your website builder platform, and comes with all the functionality to help you make more sales.
Conclusion
Ecommerce is all about convenience. If you run an online business, there’s a high chance that you have been frustrated by the lack of available contact information on the web pages of businesses. The thing is, online customers like hearing from businesses. They want answers to questions and they want them quickly to prevent being distracted by other businesses.
E-Commerce is growing rapidly. In fact, 67% of customers would rather have live chat than calling or emailing. There are several reasons why customers prefer chatting with a customer support rep to asking questions by email. The biggest reason is that they can solve their issues more quickly and efficiently (and without a frustrating back-and-forth exchange).