The Best 8 Live Chat Software for eCommerce
Jairo Guerrero
| 12 min
The Top 8 Live Chats for Online Stores in 2024
If you are running an eCommerce business you will get hundreds of online requests or visitors interactions per day. And it is impossible to handle them all effectively by hand:
Cart abandonment
Personalized advice
Product questions
Return products
Order tracking
To manage that amount of daily requests and improve your eCommerce customer experience you cannot rely on emails or phone calls only. You need a website chat available 24/7.
In this article, we'll explore the best live chat providers for your ecommerce business and so improve the shopping experience of your visitors. Yet it's ultimately your decision to determine which one aligns best with your business needs. But we give you a few hints to make your research a bit easier.
We've curated a selection of live chat widgets that can be easily integrated in any eCommerce platform such as Shopify, Magento or WordPress (WooCommerce). While some live chat plugins may have limitations, we've also included more advanced alternatives, such as conversational AI chatbots, although not all of them may have advanced AI capabilities.
⚙️ Check our AI Assisted Live Chat
Benefits of Live Chat Widgets for eCommerce Websites
We have compiled a list of the top live chat software options for eCommerce, however, there may be varying levels of limitations among them. This list represents the best available choices for enhancing your eCommerce live chats.
Multiple integrations: You can integrate your live chat seamlessly with other platforms and systems such as CRMs or sales software. Whether it's Shopify, WooCommerce, or other SaaS products you run your business on, you can choose from multiple B2B integrations. Some live chats even have an open API to create custom solutions.
⚙️ Check all our live chat integrations: Live chat Integrations
All customer data in one place:
With live chats software you can benefit from a customer service platform that goes beyond live chat. You can have access to automation tools, AI chatbots, and robust reporting features to enhance your customer service operations, lower workload and drive business growth.
⚙️ Check how we integrate all conversations in our Live chat Data Platform
Higher conversion rates:
Live chats deliver such customer service for eCommerce that it turns shoppers into fans. Why? They get the support they need quickly. Engage with leads and potential buyers in real-time while they're still on your website, presenting new collections, and recommending products with personalized options.
💡 Automate Lead Generation with The Best AI Chatbots
Real-time data:
Spot buyers in real-time and get to know your customers better with comprehensive and real-time analytics. Add to your CRM customer data such as surveys, legacy chats, and orders history, etc. Having a strong data asset per customer will help you to serve them better with the power of live chat automation.Full chat layout customization:
Fully customize your live chat to match your brand's style and identity. From the layout and design to the content and messaging, ensure that meaningful customer interactions take place in an environment that reflects your brand.AI Chatbot support and easy handover to a team member:
Take advantage of both AI chatbot technology and live chat options to provide a personalized and efficient customer service experience. You can switch between conversational chatbots and live chat based on customer preferences and needs, ensuring quick and effective support at all times.
A reliable live chat tool can improve your customer service on your webshop by providing prompt responses and even automating most tasks, improving your visitor's shopping experience. The primary goal is to reduce the workload of your support team so your live chat agent is not busy 24/7 (for that we have chatbots) while keeping your visitors happy.
💡 Check the Best AI Chatbots For eCommerce
Top 8 Live Chat Solutions for eCommerce - With Examples
We got the best 8 live chat solutions for eCommerce based on:
Automation capabilities (AI chatbots)
3rd Party integrations
Setup process
Price
Here our the top-down selection of live chats solutions for eCommerce:
Watermelon - Best Live Chat With AI Technology
With Watermelon Pulse, you can easily engage with leads, active customers and address all type of inquiries on your eCommerce site, all without the need for dedicated team members.
It can be easily deployed in any eCommerce platform such as Shopify, Magento, WooCommerce, BigCommerce… You name it. Its integration is as smooth as it gets and no-code.
Watermelon powers its live chat with an AI chatbot that can automate most of live chat conversations. Perfect to automate most of your helpdesk tasks.
💡 Improving your service desk: check best help desk software
By integrating GPT4-supported technology, Watermelon allows your customer service team not only to respond promptly but also to reduce workload as the AI chatbot automates a significant portion of your customer support interactions. Your helpdesk gets then up to 96% of all support requests automated.
Key Features of Watermelon Pulse Live Chat for eCommerce:
Seamless Chatbot-Human Transitions: Transition seamlessly between the AI chatbot and your customer experience team for more complex inquiries, ensuring a smooth handoff and uninterrupted support through the live chat.
Human-like Conversations: Your webshop visitors will get the best conversational experience. Watermelon provides instant responses to your customers with advanced conversational AI capabilities, delivering a human-like experience that boosts visitor engagement.
Simple Setup Process: You can set up your eCommerce website chat widget effortlessly with Watermelon's user-friendly & no-code integration.
Adaptability Across Languages and Platforms: You can extend your customer service automation beyond your eCommerce website to other channels like WhatsApp, Facebook or Instagram. With Watermelon's powerful integrations, implementing a live chat across multiple platforms is plug and play.
Reviews:
Rated 4.5 out of 5 stars on:
Pricing:
Free trial: Yes, 15 days.
Watermelon's pricing plan starts at just €99 per month.
Link: Pulse GPT-4 Powered AI Facebook Chatbot
LiveChat
LiveChat is the tool for real-time engagement. LiveChat is multifunctional: for lead curation, using real-time data; to help customers with product recommendations from your online store or just to get valuable customer insights in your CRM such as surveys, chat interactions, or previous orders.
Top 4 LiveChat Pros:
Omni-Channel live chat: You are able to connect with your store visitors where they prefer to be, social media, email, website chat, etc. LiveChat provides easy integrations and connection with any communication channel.
💡 Learn to Connect & Automate Your Live Chat with WhatsApp
Ai Chatbot backup: LiveChat has AI chatbots available to handle repetitive questions from your customers. It is a great filter for recurring questions on online stores: order issues, delivery times, etc. Then the AI bots can handover the conversation to a human agent for more complex inquiries.
Higher conversion rates: LiveChats get the support your customers need quickly. You will engage with leads and potential buyers in real-time presenting new products, best-sellers, personal recommendations, etc. Taking your conversion rates higher is easier with live chats.
Integrations with 3rd parties: LiveChat easily connects with any eCommerce platform such as Shopify, Magento, BigCommerce, etc. Also with business applications for sales, marketing of customer management.
LiveChat Cons
Chatbot Limitations: LiveChat's chatbot functionality might have difficulties handing over conversations to the right agents based on language, expertise or even time zone.
Technical Issues: LiveChat might have some technical issues such as difficulties with the setup, and with the use and management in general of the platform. Repeated email verification requests for chat transcripts and problems with chat widget customization might be problematic.
Pricing
LiveChat starts at 20,- USD per month per agent.
Freshdesk
Freshdesk is the live chat solution of Freshworks: the go-to tool for optimal conversations with your webshop customers, regardless of the channel, device or format. The Freshdesk live chat can be easily extended with AI chatbots and a full all-in-one tool for customer data, sales and marketing, perfect for the busy customer department of online stores.
Top 3 Advantages of Freshdesk
Centralized Conversations: Freshdesk unifies all customer data from customer support, marketing, sales together with the conversations from live chats and chatbots. All in one place: the full power of data from your online store visitors in one dashboard.
Full Channel Integrations: The Freshdesk live chat makes it easier to be in contact with your customers on their favorite channels, whether it's a website chat, email, Facebook, etc.
Ai Chatbot Capabilities: Before you get a customer service colleague busy, you will be able to help your online store visitors effectively with AI chatbots to provide quick and easy self-service responses. Thanks to the AI bots the handover to a human agent will be smoother for more complex inquiries.
3 Disadvantages of Freshdesk
Integration with challenges: Integrations with applications like Instagram and Shopify could be problematic, leading to issues on the customer support team.
Lack of customization: for example with custom integrations to other platforms might lead to technical bugs, and limitations in adapting the live chat to specific needs.
Technical issues and bugs: some bugs and technical issues might arise while working with the Freshdesk live chat, impacting directly your customer service performance. Some live chat features might have issues, and the functionality overall might suffer sudden changes.
Pricing
Freshdesk has a freemium option. Pro features start at 15,- USD per month per agent.
Zendesk live chat
Zendesk is your all-in-one for eCommerce customer support. It's all about making your life easier when it comes to chatting with your customers. Live chat sits in its core solution and it is backed up with powerful AI chatbots.
Top 3 Advantages of Zendesk live chat
Instant Support: With Zendesk, you can chat with your customers in real-time, whether they're on your website, using your mobile app, or even sliding into your DMs on social media.
Strong Integrations: Say goodbye to bouncing between different platforms. Zendesk keeps all your customer conversations in one neat workspace, so you're always on top of things.
Personalized Service: Use customer data to tailor your chats and make your customers feel like VIPs. It's all about giving them that extra special personalized touch such as product recommendations of the right steps to solve a problem.
Disadvantages of Zendesk
Data Handling Limitations: Zendesk has issues migrating conversations or customers data to other business tools you are already using, which can slow things down when you're trying to get a better customer support system.
Learning Curve: Zendesk live chat environment takes a bit of time to master. New users often get overwhelmed with the chat dashboard.
Pricing
Zendesk live chat starts at 55 EUR per agent per month.
⚙️ Check our AI Assisted Live Chat
Tidio
Tidio offers a powerful live chat app designed specifically for eCommerce wesbites and small businesses. With Tidio, you can engage with customers in real-time, providing excellent support to boost customer loyalty and increase conversion rates.
3 Advantages of Tidio eCommerce Live Chat
Multichannel Communication: Manage all customer communication channels, for example emails, live chats, Facebook messages, and Instagram DMs, in one centralized platform.
Rapid Response Time: Slash response times to under 3 minutes using canned responses and real-time typing previews, enhancing customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Higher Conversion Rates: Enhance your sales process with video calls, allowing you to showcase your store products and provide demonstrations directly within the live chat widget. You can directly showcase your best-sellers in the Tidio live chat.
3 Disadvantages of Tidio eCommerce Live Chat
Limited Free Plan Features: While Tidio offers a forever free plan, it comes with limitations on the number of website visitors you can engage with each month and the features available.
Learning Curve for Advanced Features: Some of Tidio's more advanced features, such as customizable chatbots and automated workflows, may require a learning curve to fully leverage their potential.
Limited Channel Integrations: While Tidio supports various communication channels, including websites and Facebook Messenger, support for other channels such as WhatsApp may be limited.
Pricing
Tidio live chat starts at 29 EUR/month per seat. Free subscription available up to 50 conversations.
HubSpot - Best Live chat + CRM
HubSpot offers more than just a live chat—it's a powerful CRM solution. Seamlessly implemented with any eCommerce site through self-developed plugins and apps, HubSpot ensures constant updates and introduces new features regularly. With the HubSpot Chatbot Builder, you can create dynamic bots capable of various tasks such as lead qualification, booking management, meeting scheduling, FAQ responses, and feedback collection.
The chatbots will be the first touch point for your webshop visitors before the user gets handed over to a team member.
Advantages of HubSpot eCommerce Live Chat:
Easy implementation: While HubSpot's chatbot may not be fully AI-supported, it provides flexibility and easy setup of live chat in any eCommerce platform such as Shopify, Magento or WooCommerce.
Chat log: Access your full log of live chat conversations for monitoring and addressing customer inquiries efficiently.
Live chat + Chatbot: Utilize the powerful chatbot builder to create human-like conversations and set up automatic follow-up workflows to start and finish bonding conversations with your customers and webshop visitors.
Disadvantages of HubSpot WordPress Live Chat:
High 'pro' prices: Premium features come at a higher price point.
Limited channel support: currently, it primarily supports websites and Facebook Messenger, potentially excluding other channels like WhatsApp.
Multilingual limitations: Managing real-time multilingual conversations can be challenging.
Price: HubSpot offers a free plan to get started, with paid plans ranging from €20 to €1.200,- per month.
Drift live chat
With the Drift live chat, you can connect with your website visitors in real-time, providing your customers (and potential customers) with instant answers and a hyper-personalized experience. Your business will fade away from long response times and you will get higher engagement and conversion rates. Conversations with this live chat will help your customer team and sales processes to boost revenue.
Top 3 Drift's live chat advantages
Insightful Analytics: Drift offers great analytics and insights that provide a clear picture of website live chat performance. Drift's KPIs dashboard will help you understand for example which conversations will lead you to quality leads or which customer questions are the most common. Knowledge is power as they say, so you can continually optimize your service, sales and marketing strategies for high-level results
Conversational AI: With Drift's live chat software, you can offer personalized automated messages and tailored responses. With the use of AI technology, the live chat is supported with an AI chatbot that allows your team to take over only the most complex questions from your website visitors.
Customizability and Ease of Use: Drift offers customizable AI tools that can be tailored to your specific industry or use cases. For example, to deploy AI conversational chatbots use automated replies to improve efficiency. Drift's live chat counts also with a no-code implementation and a user-friendly interface and quick AI deployment.
3 Drift's live chat advantages
Limited Functionality: Drift' live chat might have limitations on advanced features. It counts with automation flows for conversations and basic conversational capabilities which could lower the engagement of the live chat therefore the positive impact in customer service or sales.
Limited AI Capabilities: The AC chatbots provided by Drift have limited conversational features and have low value if your organization needs high-end automation to lower your team's workload.
Limited Integration Options: Despite having many integrations for its live chat, Drift lacks integrations to relevant communication channels such as Facebook or WhatsApp.
Pricing
Drift plans start at 2.500,- USD per month.
Gorgias
Gorgias offers D2C brands and online stores a powerful live chat with multiple integrations. Gorgias' live chat widget allows online businesses to address shopper inquiries quickly. This prevents every question from becoming an email ticket, lowering the workload of the service team. Gorgias counts with an easy implementation for Shopify (the go-to platform of D2C brands).
Top 3 Gorgias' live chat advantages
AI-Powered Automation: Gorgias leverages AI to respond faster to customer inquiries with autoresponders. Gorgias’ AI features include, for example, closing spam tickets or recommending relevant articles or pages to the visitor. The live chat with the AI capabilities reduce the workload of your customer team.
Improved Measurement: Gorgias uses AI to automatically tag conversations, so your customer service agents get valuable insights into customer interactions and behaviour. Improving performance with these advanced KPIs would allow you, for example, to assign the right teams to the right conversations based on the automatic tagging of the Gorgias live chat.
Ecommerce Native: Gorgias was built to support eCommerce business. Any eCommerce platform such as Shopify, Magento, BigCommerce or Magento have ready-to-use integrations with Gorgias live chat. The live chat dashboard provides agents with access to order history and customer data directly within the helpdesk interface, so it takes a few seconds until your online store agents can fully help your webshop visitor.
3 Gorgias' disadvantages
Technical and Operational Problems: The live chat feature could fail to respond effectively due to technical issues, which will lower the engagement that users experience on your online store, as they might wait too long to get a reponse from your customer service agents.
Limited Features and Integrations: Gorgias still has basic reporting functionality and integrations outside the eCommerce spectrum might be limited. For example, connections with your current CRM or other business systems might now be available on the Gorgias live chat.
Limited Automation: The AI leverage of Gorgias can be limited for complex conversation workflows. Despite the internal features count on AI technology for automated task processing, the AI conversational features used for your webshop visitors are not among the best functionalities of Drift.
Pricing
Gorgias starts its plans at 50,- USD per month.
eCommerce Live Chat Examples
Live chat for eCommerce with the power of conversational AI #1
HUUS.nl, a booming webshop specialized in home interior products, had also booming customer inquiries as its online presence grew. Despite having a live chat feature, their customer service team found themselves overwhelmed by repetitive queries, consuming valuable time that could be allocated to other tasks. So the Huus team wanted to automate all repetitive tasks to lower the service team workload so they implemented a live chat + AI chatbot named Guus.
Huus has automated 65% of customer interactions, significantly reducing the workload for the customer service team. This automation has led to the equivalent of one full-time employee being freed up. The Watermelon chatbot operates 24/7, handling most inquiries, while a dedicated human agent remains available during extended hours for personalized assistance.
💡 Check the Best AI Chatbots For eCommerce
Live chat for eCommerce with the power of conversational AI #2
Ticketpoint, one of the largest event ticket providers in the Netherlands, faced the challenge of ensuring efficient customer service. With 200,000 tickets sold for events like Toppers concerts, the need for prompt assistance was paramount. Recognizing the potential of chatbots, Ticketpoint embarked on integrating Chatbot Kees from Watermelon.ai into their customer service operations. The chatbot automated most conversations coming from the webshop and allowed the agents to handle more complex cases directly with the live chat.
Within just three weeks of deployment, Chatbot Kees seamlessly integrated into Ticketpoint's customer service team, automating an impressive 80% of customer inquiries. This automation not only relieved the workload of human agents but also ensured round-the-clock customer support, enhancing service accessibility and efficiency. With Kees' proactive approach, weekends became more enjoyable for the team, and customer queries were addressed promptly, contributing to heightened satisfaction levels.
FAQs about eCommerce live chat tools
What is live chat in eCommerce?
Live chat in eCommerce refers to the widget on online stores that allows visitors (many of them customers) to communicate directly with your customer service team in real-time through a chat window or popup. A live chat allows you to provide immediate customer assistance, which increases the time visitors spend in your online store.
With an ecommerce live chat you help visitors with product recommendations, order tracking, or regular product questions. A live chat is not only a customer experience booster but it also helps your marketing and sales efforts as it puts you in contact directly with your current and potential customers.
Which company has the best live chat?
The best live chat provider for eCommerce is the one that offers AI assistance through chatbots. As you cannot have a live chat human agent 24/7 answering questions, you have to have an AI chatbot doing work day and night. The best live chat has to provide also an easy and smooth handover to a human agent and be able to centralize all conversations from social media channels, from the website, as well as the customer emails or phone calls.
How to do live chat with customers?
To live chat with customers effectively, eCommerce businesses can follow these steps:
Choose a reliable live chat software provider with AI assistance (AI chatbots).
Integrate the live chat widget into your eCommerce website without coding.
Train your customer service team with the best practices to handle customer questions and complaints.
Train your AI chatbot with all the data you have from your business (documentation, FAQs, product data, etc).
Automate as many conversations as possible to lower your service workload.
Ensure smooth transitions between AI chatbots and human agents for complex inquiries.
Offer outstanding support on the most complex inquiries only (the rest should be automated)
Monitor and analyze all your live chat interactions to improve the chat experience.
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