Ecommerce businesses now consider live chat software as a crucial tool due to the increasing customer expectations for quick and convenient support in the digital era. To meet these demands, ecommerce stores need to provide efficient service options.
In order to provide an outstanding live chat experience, businesses should make a proper investment in suitable tools. Merely integrating a chat widget on your website is insufficient. Your team requires a tool that enables efficient conversation management, offers immediate guidance, and facilitates prompt customer assistance. According to our thorough research, LiveChat and HubSpot are considered top-notch live chat tools for ecommerce.
Furthermore, it is important to ensure that your chat solution seamlessly integrates with the ecommerce tools you are currently utilizing, including Wix, Shopify, WooCommerce, and others.
Today, we will be exploring several top-notch live chat software choices suitable for ecommerce stores.
What Exactly is Ecommerce Live Chat?
You can enhance the customer experience on your ecommerce store by integrating user-friendly live chat add-ons. These convenient plugins can be easily incorporated into your current store, granting customers the ability to access live chat support. By offering website visitors and consumers an additional avenue to seek assistance and guidance, these practical tools greatly contribute to boosting customer satisfaction ratings.
It is important to note that for small ecommerce businesses considering the adoption of live chat software, it is necessary to have a support team available to respond to queries. The quantity of support agents directly impacts the speed of response time.
Despite the availability of AI and automation tools in various solutions for chat agent support, these additional “bots” only offer limited assistance such as preventing cart abandonment, addressing FAQs, and increasing conversion rates through upselling. Nevertheless, when it comes to lead generation, they cannot replicate the empathetic experience provided by a real human.
What are The Best Live Chat Software for Ecommerce Platforms?
In order to boost the efficiency of your salesforce and customer service team, it is worth considering some of the top live chat service choices available.
LiveChat
LiveChat is one of the leading live chat software for ecommerce as it offers extensive coverage for customer support.
LiveChat offers a variety of features and plans to accommodate various budgetary requirements. With its goals and sales tracker, file sharing, analytics, and lead generation capabilities, it is specifically designed for ecommerce websites. Moreover, it stands out by allowing users to add the chat widget to an unlimited number of websites or apps using just one license.
What are the best ecommerce features?
- 200+ 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
Pricing
Even though LiveChat does not provide any free options, they do offer a 14-day free trial exclusively. The Starter plan will require a payment of $20 per agent per month when billed annually, while the Team plan will cost $41 per agent per month on an annual billing cycle. There are also month-to-month plans available but at a higher monthly cost. Moreover, Business and Enterprise plans are also alternatives to consider.
In order to utilize the specific ecommerce functionalities, it is recommended to have at least the Team plan.
Tidio Chat
Tidio Chat offers a wide range of features, including a Shopify chatbot, that can be beneficial to your ecommerce website. It is particularly suitable if you desire artificial intelligence capabilities to replace human agents.
For Ecommerce websites that are unwilling to invest in live chat services, this is the optimal choice. The free plan, available indefinitely, includes all fundamental services suitable for small businesses as well as some medium-sized ones. Moreover, it provides the majority of crucial chat services at competitive prices. Additionally, it can be applied to multiple websites.
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
Pricing
With the free forever plan, you can engage in conversations with up to 50 different visitors per month, either by yourself or through your agents. Additionally, this plan includes a chatbot feature that can handle up to 100 unique visitor conversations per month.
In order to enjoy the premium features, you have the option to select either the Communicator Plan or the Chatbot Plan, both priced at $15.83 per agent, per month. These prices include annual payment plans. However, if you choose to pay on a monthly basis, it is obvious that the cost will be higher each month.
The Tidio Plan, in contrast to the other two, offers a significant increase in features and costs. It is specifically designed for larger companies with substantial budgets and more intricate requirements.
Olark
Every online interaction with Olark’s chat tools makes it incredibly effortless for you to communicate with customers and gain valuable insights for learning and enhancing your skills.
Olark is highly suitable for businesses seeking growth as it facilitates lead generation, sales enhancement, and live chat assistance. Furthermore, it is compatible with multiple domains.
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
Pricing
If you opt not to continue with Olark after the 14-day free trial of their premium plans, you will be switched to a highly restricted free plan that includes support for only one agent and a maximum of 20 chats per month.
You can opt for a longer billing term to save money while the paid plans begin at $29 per agent on a monthly basis.
Olark offers additional features called “PowerUps” that can be purchased for an additional monthly cost. To illustrate, incorporating a feature allowing customers to share their screens with agents would require an extra fee of $99 per month. Though costly, this could prove to be a worthwhile investment for businesses dealing with a large number of customer support inquiries.
Freshchat
Freshchat is a CRM that operates in the cloud and maintains its focus on three distinct areas.
- Conversion
- Onboarding
- Customer support
You will have the ability to answer customer inquiries through various platforms such as web, mobile, or social media.
Freshchat offers four different plans to accommodate businesses of all sizes, ensuring no one is excluded. The free plan is anything but basic, as it provides advanced features like rich messaging, agent groups, bulk actions, 100 campaign contacts, and more. Additionally, it supports high-volume and large enterprises by offering APIs for custom integrations and scalability through the Freshworks platform.
What are the best ecommerce features?
- Triggered messages or email campaigns based on customer-specific behavior
- Bots to help with lead generation
- Rich messaging to share files, videos, and FAQs
- Clearbit integration to know your customer without requesting for details
- Segment users based on geography or behavior for targeted action
- Reengage with users on mobiles with push notifications
- Chat routing based on agent competence and load
- Integration with top marketing and customer support software
- Co-browsing and screen sharing
- Smart plugs to pull information from Team Inbox to engage customers with context
- Chat transcripts
- Create a ticket from chats
- Conversion report, label report, and team performance report
Pricing
There are three available plans.
- Growth – $15 – for small teams.
- Pro – $39 – for growing teams.
- Enterprise – $69 – best value for large teams.
The rates are charged on a per agent, per month basis, and are billed annually. If you choose to pay on a monthly basis, the rates will be higher. Additionally, you have the option to try any plan for free for a period of 21 days. Moreover, there is a Free forever plan available that allows for the use of their chatbot on an optional, pay-as-you-go basis, supporting up to 100 agents. For this plan, 1,000 bot sessions per month will cost $75.
HubSpot
HubSpot is a highly versatile SaaS vendor, providing intelligent solutions for numerous areas such as sales, customer service, and marketing. In addition to their premium marketing hubs, HubSpot also offers various free tools to utilize, such as a live chat application.
Customize the HubSpot live chat software to align with your brand by incorporating your preferred colors and logos, generating personalized messages for customers, and conveniently monitoring all your messages in a single location. Additionally, take advantage of automation capabilities to guarantee appropriate routing of conversations within your business team.
All conversations generated using HubSpot’s live chat software are saved and archived in your conversational inbox. This includes timeline insights that offer a comprehensive overview of your customer relationship. Additionally, the system effortlessly integrates with the HubSpot CRM and other tools. Furthermore, you have the choice to develop personalized chatbots to complement your live chat team.
In addition to live chat, HubSpot offers various free features such as forms, email tracking tools, insights on contacts and companies, tools for managing pipelines, reports on contact activity, and systems for scheduling meetings.
Intercom
Intercom, similar to HubSpot, provides businesses with a complete ecosystem for enhancing customer service efforts and boosting sales. Its platform incorporates robust live chat tools that enable companies to develop a personalized business messenger, facilitating proactive communication with customers, prompt response to inquiries, and real-time resolution of concerns.
By embedding your chat system into various websites and apps, you can conveniently manage all your conversations in a single inbox. Additionally, with the inclusion of a comprehensive customer data platform, you can effortlessly track essential information about every customer and their preferences.
In addition, Intercom offers the opportunity for businesses to enhance their customer service by incorporating chatbot capabilities and automations into the same platform. Utilizing Intercom’s platform not only grants live chat capabilities, but also provides workload management tools, ticketing software, outcome reporting, resolution bots, and tools for developing knowledge bases.
Tawk.to
Tawk.to is widely recognized as a customer service platform that grants users entry to various features such as team chat, live chat, ticketing, CRM capabilities, knowledge bases, and more. With its user-friendly interface, this platform facilitates seamless collaboration among teams and enhances your understanding of your target audience. By monitoring customer activity in real-time, you gain valuable insights into their genuine needs.
By incorporating a bit of JavaScript into your ecommerce website, Tawk.to enables you to allocate distinct conversations to every member of your team, according to user requirements. Additionally, you can establish knowledge bases to facilitate self-service and ensure that agents can access relevant pages whenever they require additional information regarding your product or service.
The chat widget allows for complete customization and can be used with Android and iOS mobile apps to communicate with customers. Tawk.to also offers a variety of advanced features including desktop notifications, sentiment tracking, engagement monitoring, agent alerts, detailed reporting, and scheduling tools. Additionally, it supports over 45 languages.
New features are frequently being added to the evolving platform. Tawk.to has recently introduced message sneak peeks, visitor information tracking, in-chat payments, and automated translation support.
Shopify Inbox
If your online store is already powered by Shopify, it would be logical to utilize the Live chat feature that is integrated into the platform. Shopify Inbox is a simple and convenient tool that enables business owners to engage with audiences through various channels. The unified inbox combines messages received from Messenger, Instagram, Live chat, and the Shop app.
By utilizing Shopify Inbox, you gain valuable insights that enhance your chat functionality. Through your online store, you have the ability to view customers’ cart contents whenever you engage with them. Moreover, you can categorize various messages and utilize chat to provide discount codes, thereby boosting conversions.
Shopify Inbox offers customized “quick replies” to enhance productivity by allowing users to send prompt responses. It also facilitates automated updates regarding customers’ order status. Additionally, Shopify Inbox provides automated messages for proactive customer outreach, as well as options for follow-up emails.
LiveAgent
LiveAgent and LiveChat both provide companies with a complete customer service and support solution. This all-inclusive helpdesk software simplifies the process of tracking tickets, assigning tasks, categorizing customers, and communicating with clients, no matter their location.
By integrating LiveAgent, you can consolidate all the communication channels you employ to interact with your customers into a unified platform. This enables you to easily connect email, chat, calls, forums, contact forms, video calls, social media platforms, and even Slack. Furthermore, seamlessly integrating the system with various ecommerce tools, CRM systems, analytics services, and other applications will pose no difficulties.
With LiveAgent, you have the ability to personalize your support widget to cater to your customers and employ automations to ensure smooth conversations. Additionally, you can establish your own knowledge base on the platform, enabling customers to assist themselves effortlessly. LiveAgent also provides support for advanced reporting and insights, rules and time rules, white labelling, feedback management, proactive chat invitations, and visitor monitoring.
Gorgias
Gorgias, similar to numerous leading companies in the live chat solutions sector for ecommerce brands, is a platform that is fairly extensive. It provides access to a range of features that cover voice management, social media interactions, SMS, and email. Additionally, it offers automation capabilities to enhance your workflow and employs AI technologies for intent and sentiment detection.
The Gorgias live chat app integrates with your current ecommerce store, consolidating information about your products and customer history in one platform. You have the ability to create proactive messages, enabling you to connect with your clients immediately after they visit your store or when they navigate to a particular page. Moreover, the app offers routing options to ensure that chats are automatically directed to the appropriate agent.
There are various ways to increase productivity, such as setting up quick replies, or developing personalized chat apps to enable customers to support themselves. Additionally, there are numerous customization options available, allowing you to tailor your widget to align with your brand and website style. Moreover, you can establish automatic replies for business hours. Users have the flexibility to assign specific agent availability and enable seamless transitions for customers between live chat, email, and social channel conversations.
Choosing the Best Live Chat Software for Ecommerce
With minimal effort, you can instantly incorporate a custom chat window into your website if you opt for the top live chat software designed for ecommerce stores including BigCommerce, Shopify, WooCommerce, and Magento.
There is a wide range of excellent tools available, along with different live chat features for you to explore. These include proactive chat systems that pop up, tools that store offline messages, and solutions that utilize AI bots to enhance your support agents.
The most suitable ecommerce live chat software for your needs will be influenced by several factors, such as your customer engagement management approach and the number of team members you wish to accommodate. Additionally, it’s worth considering whether you desire integration with other support tools. Certain applications offer built-in functions for handling support tickets, CRM tracking, and analytics, which can minimize the need for numerous integrations.
Although there are free live chat options available, ecommerce businesses should consider that the most advanced tools for sales teams typically come with a cost. If you desire advanced features for customer communication, such as intelligent chat routing and automated responses to inquiries, you may have to invest more in ecommerce live chat.
What features should you look for in live chat software for ecommerce?
Here are some features that live chat software for ecommerce should be capable of, depending on the size and characteristics of your store.
- 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
By integrating these chat software with ecommerce platforms like Shopify or WooCommerce, along with a robust ticketing system and offline messaging, you can ensure comprehensive customer support coverage. This combination ensures a smoother workflow as well.
