Ecommerce retail in 2019 saw $3.5 trillion in sales, globally. In 2020, the US alone saw the highest growth in online retail in nearly two decades. With the evolving world and the continued need for consumers to stay home, these trends are going to continue through 2021 and beyond. We’ve reached an era where ecommerce will continue to grow and the demands of consumers for convenience will continue.

Convenience and shopper engagement go hand in hand and brands need to continue to iterate and grow to meet their needs in a highly competitive landscape. Many businesses have taken the steps to modernize their businesses through better online payment methods, online subscriptions to encourage customer retention, review management for their products, and smarter marketing efforts. But what is next? How can businesses stay ahead?

The answer is to make it easy or your customers to talk to your business. This is paramount because more than 50% of consumers feel that companies don’t make it easy to contact them, with 57% saying they often have trouble finding answers on the company’s website. That’s a startling statistic and when you think of your personal experiences trying to get in touch with a brand, it shows!Customers need to get in contact with you to:

• Ask questions about a product

• Work through a website or payment error

• Share feedback about their purchase

• Process a return

And so many more reasons! When there are so many online retailers, providing information on demand helps you stand out. Providing conversational commerce increases that communication and convenience with the consumer. When brands make it easy for their customers to talk to them, that makes it easy for their customers to come back.

AiChat works with retailers like TESCO, Philips Lighting, Petron Miles, MR D.

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Y and MYDIN to integrate intelligent conversational communications into their shopping experiences. Providing these information touchpoints help your customer make decisions quicker and increases shopper engagement and loyalty. Below we share examples of these use cases so that you too can benefit from retail chat and other intelligent communication strategies and increase your ecommerce sales.

How often have you personally started adding items to your online shopping cart and then left to do something else? Abandoned shopping carts are common for many reasons. Many consumers are living in a mobile-first world, doing everything on the go, comparison shopping, and more. Some estimates show abandoned carts with startling rates of 75.5%.

There are some website best practices that will help with reducing the percentage of abandoned carts that result from consumer frustration. Optimizing website speed, keeping shipping costs low, making account creation optional, and other strategies will help reduce your consumers abandoning their cart.

However, the number of abandoned carts will never be zero, which is why re-engaging customers afterward is essential.

Many companies start and stop their abandoned cart reminders with email only. Move away from email clutter and get straight to where your customer wants you, in chat. AiChat’s Conversational Commerce Suite is your automated virtual sales assistant, providing personalized shopping experiences for your customers wherever they are in your journey. If we compare the average WhatsApp open rate of 98% to the average open rate of cart abandonment emails (45%), wouldn’t you also choose chat functionality?Impactful marketing reaches consumers where they are. It understands their personal preferences, remembers their previous purchases to make recommendations, and adds the convenience of easy communication. Let your tools help you understand what your customers need so that your customers are more likely to engage.

Don’t simply email blast your customers with the latest sale. Any company can do that. Instead, provide that contextual help to your customer. AiChat can do this with its quiz-style product recommender and smart retail chatbot functionality.

AiChat helps you build personal messages at scale, without adding significant time lifts. With AiChat Conversational Commerce solution, retailers can use predictive shopping technology to deliver the right product to the right consumer, automatically. Trigger this feature and more, like new stock arrivals, price drop alerts, and cart abandonment messages through chat.

When consumer interactions are stored in a holistic approach, combining marketing efforts in one software or tool, you get what the consumer needs across their marketing lifecycle. Increase retention and boost sales with an ecommerce solution.

Maintain customer satisfaction and increase the likelihood of retention by making support easy for the consumer and your brand. Help your customer gain support over a complaint, return a faulty product, check for a status update, and ask questions through an all-in-one solution that combines customer interactions.

Context matters, so empower your support agents with centralized information. Making it easier to provide support helps boost your location’s online reputation management, including your public reviews, NPS, and CSAT scores. With tools like AiChat’s Conversational Service Suite, you are able to automate repetitive manual tasks, get ahead of consumer questions by providing helpful insight before and after the transaction, see all information in one place, and better engage with customers efficiently.

The consumer online shopping landscape is not what it used to be. If you haven’t updated your brand standards to meet the evolving expectations of consumers, now is the time to stand out. Shoppers want retailers to earn their loyalty by providing customized experiences and easy to access information and support. Through conversational commerce and retail chatbot features, you help build a valuable relationship with consumers. Meet customers where they are.AiChat is empowering retailers to do what they were meant to do, help their customers get the information and care they need while increasing profits. With the evolving world we live in now, increase your shopper engagement with modern tools that helps their journey with you grow. Learn more about Conversational Commerce solutions, our personalization processes, and more by requesting a demo today.