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Jacob Morrow

2024-09-11 11:59:45

2414 Views, 7 min read

“Can You Add an AI Chatbot to Shopify?”

Shopify doesn’t have a native chatbot feature, but you can easily integrate third-party platforms to create a chatbot for your store. This helps automate customer interactions and streamline support.

Shopify is a gem in the e-commerce industry that empowers businesses of all sizes to run and manage their online stores. As per statistics, there are 4+ million live e-commerce websites created and powered by Shopify. Besides that, Shopify generated $7 billion in revenue in 2023.

Although Shopify is an excellent platform for the e-commerce industry, businesses cannot compete well by just creating and running a Shopify store. Technological advancements have urged the need to enhance the Shopify experience for customers. One such emerging way is integrating a chatbot for Shopify.

A Shopify chatbot can modernize the way you handle customer inquiries and provide customers with personalized recommendations to increase their engagement and drive sales.


shopify chatbot

What is a Shopify Chatbot?

A Shopify chatbot is a virtual assistant integrated into your Shopify store that interacts with and assists customers. It can help customers with:

  • Answering FAQs
  • Assisting in product searches with personalized recommendations
  • Processing orders
  • Checking order status
  • Filing returns

what is a shopify chatbot

Due to natural language processing (NLP), a Shopify AI chatbot can interact with customers in human-like conversations. Furthermore, it is trained with your corporate data, so it can respond to customers' queries in real time with the right information.

In short, a Shopify chatbot is your virtual 24/7 customer support agent. It keeps customers engaged, resolves their queries, and boosts sales.

Benefits of Integrating an AI Chatbot for Shopify

Shopify has about 11% of the total e-commerce market share. In addition, the pandemic boost has also made the industry competitive. Therefore, integrating a Shopify AI chatbot can give a competitive edge and many other operational benefits.


benefits of ai shopify chatbot

Some of the key benefits of AI chatbot for Shopify are as follows:

Customer Engagement

Imagine that a customer visits your Shopify store at 2 a.m. They want to make a purchase but have a question about the product. If you haven't integrated a chatbot, the customer might leave without purchasing due to the lack of immediate assistance. Alternatively, they may send you a message and have to wait until morning to hear from you.

In contrast, if you have integrated a Shopify AI chatbot, customers can get real-time responses and complete their purchases while you are having sweet dreams. The chatbot can provide your customers with 24/7 support and engage with them in human-like chats to eventually lead them to purchase.

Personalized Experience

Did you know 71% of customers want businesses to deliver personalized interactions? A chatbot for Shopify is the key to driving personalization. It can provide personalized product recommendations and coupon codes based on customer preferences. This personalized experience makes customers feel valued and leads them to make repeat purchases.

Support Automation

Many Shopify businesses have to spare significant time answering FAQs, processing orders, and handling similar activities. However, a Shopify chatbot can automate most of these activities and reduce the workload. This way, businesses can achieve operational efficiency and focus more on growing the business.

Data Insights

When customers interact with your Shopify chatbot, you gather valuable insights about customer preferences, behavior, and issues. These insights can then help you make better data-driven decisions.

Scalability

At the start, you may have manageable customer queries. But they increase as your business grows. A chatbot for Shopify is your scalable customer support solution that can easily handle more customer queries without asking for more resources.

Use Cases of Shopify AI Chatbot

Shopify AI chatbot is already in action in many Shopify stores. Some of the common use cases of chatbot for Shopify include:

  • Lead generation
  • Processing/tracking orders
  • Customer service

Let's look at a few real-world examples of Shopify chatbots to understand its use cases:

1. EverGreen – Chatbot for Clarifying Product Queries

EverGreen is a UK-based Shopify store that supplies composters, water buts, and recycling bins. It helps customers lower their environmental footprint.


When you visit its website, you will see a chatbot in the bottom right corner. You can use it to get instant answers to your queries. It even supports uploading images as input. During business hours, it also supports interacting with human agents in real time.


evergreen chatbot

2. The Millshop Online – Chatbot for Customer Support

The Millshop Online is a Shopify store that provides a wide range of fabrics for cushions, curtains, and upholstery.


It has also integrated a chatbot that can provide instant answers about shipping details, tracking orders, return policies, and others. You can also use the chat box to write customized messages.


millshop online chatbot

How to Build a Free Chatbot for Shopify

Creating a chatbot for Shopify is no rocket science. Your main job is to find a reliable chatbot builder that can help you create a full-fledged chatbot for Shopify. To ease the search hassle, GPTBots ticks all the checkboxes to be your go-to platform for building a free chatbot for Shopify.

GPTBots is a no-code chatbot builder that provides a user-friendly platform to build an AI-driven Shopify chatbot. It provides pre-designed templates and customization options to create a full-fledged chatbot for:

  • Customer support
  • Leads generation
  • Orders handling
  • SEO content creation
  • Data analysis

gptbots main feature

With GPTBots, you get a visual builder to design the chatbot flow effectively. In addition, you can easily train the bot with your business data by uploading PDFs, docs, spreadsheets, website URLs, and more.

The key features of GPTBots include:

  • Visual, no-code chatbot builder.
  • Create a diverse range of chatbots with pre-designed templates.
  • Easily trainable chatbot with a corporate knowledge base (PDFs, URLs, docs, etc.).
  • Take input in text, image, and other formats.
  • Intelligent chatbot-human handoff.
  • Test and debug support to improve bot outputs.
Get Started For Free

In short, GPTBots provides an all-in-one platform to create a powerful Shopify AI chatbot.

Follow the below steps to learn how to build a free chatbot for your Shopify store in minutes and start increasing your sales:

Step 1: Go to GPTBots.ai and create an account.

Step 2: Click “New Bot” and choose a template or create from scratch.


Create a New Bot

Step 3: In the Config panel, set the bot settings, like LLM model, maximum response length, response format, and context allocation. Under the "Identity Prompt", clearly explain the chatbot skills, roles, and tasks.


Bot Settings

Step 4: Next, you have to train the bot with your business knowledge. To do so, click Knowledge > Documents > Add Documents and upload the necessary files.


Add Documents to GPTBots

Step 5: After training the bot, go to the Config panel and use the Debug mode to test the bot responses.


chatfuel

Step 6: By now, you have built and trained the chatbot. So, the next move is to integrate the chatbot with your Shopify store.

To do so, you can embed the chatbot as a bubble widget on your business website. When the user taps the bubble widget, the chat window will open.

Here are the steps to integrate the Shopify chatbot with the bubble widget:

  1. Go to the "Integration" tab and click "Bubble Widget".

  2. integrate with bubble widget

  3. If you want to change the widget name, logo, or UI, click the "Custom UI" section and make changes.

  4. customize ui

  5. Copy the integration code and paste it into the head tag of your website's HTML page.

  6. bubble widget link

  7. Go to the Shopify Store admin panel, find the template in use, and enter "Edit Code".
  8. shopify admin panel edit code
  9. Find the "theme.liquid" file, paste the embed code within the <head> tag, and save it.
  10. paste embed code in theme.liquid
  11. The widget bubble will appear at the bottom right corner of your Store website for visitors to use for consultation.
  12. widget bubble visible shopify store

Bonus Tip: Create and Enable Prompt Messages for Shopify Chatbot

If you want to show proactive messages as prompt messages or cards to capture leads in your Shopify chatbot, you can do that easily with GPTBots, as follows:

How to Create Prompt Messages

  • Message Content: Set up to 3 pieces of content that display dynamically from bottom to top.
  • Display Rules: Configure up to 3 trigger conditions to display proactive messages when user-specific criteria are met.
  • - Trigger Conditions: Judge based on factors like browser, language, time zone, location, operating system, or UTM parameters.

    - Expressions: Use calculation expressions (e.g., =/≠/range/contains) for values like numbers or strings.

    - AND & OR: Configure if all or any conditions trigger the message.

    - Events: Set messages to trigger immediately or after a delay.

  • Frequency Control: Limit message display to avoid disturbing users, setting maximum displays per website or page daily, weekly, or monthly.

create prompt messages

How to Create Card Messages

After setting the card content, the configuration options are similar to prompt messages.

  • Image Upload: Custom images can be uploaded; optimize image size for faster loading.
  • Title/Content: Customers can write custom text.

create card messages

How to Enable Proactive Messages

  • Under the message list, enable the proactive message you want to use.
  • Visit the website to view and interact with the proactive message.

enable prompt messages

That's it! This way, you can create a complete AI chatbot for Shopify with the feature-rich visual builder of GPTBots.

Conclusion

Shopify has 2.1 million active users on average per day. With this much active customer base, you don't want to lose them to your competitors. Building and integrating a free chatbot for Shopify is attributed to increased customer engagement, satisfaction, and retention rates.

With GPTBots, it is easier than ever to build a Shopify AI chatbot without any technicalities. Therefore, the wrap-up of this guide is to sign up with GPTBots and build and integrate your Shopify chatbot today. Moreover, you will get 100 free credits monthly to use the platform for free.

Get Started For Free

Discover how GPTBots can revolutionize your business today.