Best AI Chatbots for Shopify: Our Ultimate Round-Up

In today’s ever-competitive market, your business’s customer experience is a huge differentiator. In fact, 79% of consumers place just as much emphasis on the quality of a brand’s service as the product itself, and with a surge in 201.53% more stores joining Shopify, standing out from the crowd has never been so essential. 

So with that said, it’s not surprising that more and more customers want companies to expand their customer engagement methods and provide increasingly innovative customer experiences.

While many eCommerce store owners are eager to respond to this call to action, implementing such strategies is often easier said than done. Concerningly, 68% of customer support teams feel overwhelmed by their workload, and over 30% don’t have the right tools to do their job well.

….And this is where using the best AI chatbots for Shopify can be worth its weight in gold.

An online chatbot can be a great addition to your customer support team- especially if you’re struggling to manage high volumes of customer requests. Interestingly, ServiceBell estimates that chatbots can handle as many as 30% of customer interactions. The result? Stores can continue offering first-rate service without employing more customer service agents to pick up the slack.  

That said, how do you pick the best AIchatbots for Shopify? Let’s take a closer look…

What is an AI Chatbot?

With the help of a chatbot, businesses can extend their service hours by using the bot to answer messages when service agents are offline. You can also use bots to set up service tickets for live agents to pick up when they sign back on. On top of that, chatbots can perform essential functions, including making appointments, bookings, purchases, and capturing leads. 

Bots can also hold multiple conversations simultaneously and find and retrieve information almost instantly, ensuring customer queries are dealt with quickly so that they aren’t stifled by phone queues or backlogs. 

So with that said, a high-quality chatbot platform should be able to do the following for your business:

• Provide answers to simple questions
• Help respond to customer complaints quicker
• Extend the business’s contactable hours
• Provide your customers with efficient and timely responses
• Easily integrate with your Shopify store

So, with the following criteria in mind, let’s see who’s up to the task:

What Are the Best AI chatbots for Shopify for 2023?

Tidio Chat

Tidio is another live chat and AI chatbot combo built to wow. It’s designed to help small-to-medium-sized businesses get more out of their customer service strategies. With its drag-and-drop visual editor, you can create basic chat flows in just five minutes. You can benefit from 35-prebuilt conversation templates or design more complicated interactions from scratch or by customizing a template. You simply pull actions, triggers, and conditions to pre-program compelling responses to customer inputs – no coding is required. 

For example, you can do the following:

• Automate responses to frequent customer queries
• Generate leads with tailored user greetings – for instance, the bot can tell if a visitor is new to the site, a recurring visitor or if they haven’t interacted with you in a while, and tailor their messaging accordingly.
• Create and distribute customer tickets to relevant team members
• Offer visitors discounts, recommendations, and promotions based on their buying history
• Elicit customer feedback with quick in-conversation surveys
• Handle, and process returns 

Tidio Chat also boasts a simple Shopify integration that you download from the app store. On top of that, Tidio also integrates with other messaging systems, including Instagram and Facebook, to localize chats into just one inbox. This makes managing multiple live chats much easier, decreasing the likelihood of your team inadvertently missing a message!

Tidio also makes it easy to transition from automated to live chat. Agents automatically get a notification when a user wants to leave the conversation or talk to a human, and they can pick up the reigns!

Pricing

Tidio Chat’s pricing plans are as follows:

• Free – $0 a month: 50 live chat conversations, 100 chatbot conversations, email support, and use for up to three agents.
• Communicator – $19 a month: Unlimited live chat and 100 chatbot conversations, 24-hour live chat support, and can be used by five operators.
• Chatbots – $39 a month: Everything above, plus 40,000 chatbot convos and the visual chatbot editor.
• Tidio Plus – $289 a month: Everything above plus you can create custom chatbot engagements and add more operators to your plan as needed. You’ll also get emergency phone support.

HubSpot

HubSpot is a great starting point for our AI chatbot journey. With HubSpot’s chatbot builder, your chatbot can sustain engaging customer conversations and target specific customer segments. For example, if you’ve connected with Hubspot’s CRM, you can use information from your contact list to focus on specific groups according to their demographic, location, and more so that when a contact lands on a specific page, a custom welcome message could appear out of the chatbox.

You can also use this bot to:

• Send personalized messages to customers and answer their questions
• Collect contact information and qualify leads
• Correspond and answer customer questions when your in-person support team is offline
• Book meetings 
• Direct customers to a live agent
• Create customer support tickets for agents to answer later
• Trigger an email sequence after the conversation has ended

There’s no code needed to build a chatbot, and you can have it up and running within minutes. You begin with a template with fillable boxes for each part of the conversation. Then you simply click on the sections you want to edit to add your responses, actions, or conditions.

You can lead customers through complex questions using IF and THEN statements to control how the bot responds to customer queries, including whether the chat needs to be passed to a live agent. For example, you could program the bot to ask a user a question like ‘Do you need assistance?’ and use an IF statement, such as IF an answer includes “yes,” and “shipping,” direct them to the relevant information like your shipping policies page.

To add your Hubspot bot to a Shopify site, you need two things – a Hubspot account and to set up a conversational inbox inside that account. There’s no integration for the chatbot. Rather, you’ll have to follow this set of documentation to integrate your chatbot with your Shopify store: 

1. Install the Hubspot tracker code on your Shopify site.
2. Connect your mail client to your Hubspot account.
3. Create and add the bot to your website.

Pricing

The Hubspot chatbot builder forms part of Hubspot’s Sales Hub plan, but you can get started using their free Sales Hub plan to test out the features. Here, you can use the bot but with limited automation and scalability. To unlock more of Hubspot’s chatbot, you can opt for one of their paid plans starting at $50 a month.

ChatBot (by LiveChat)

LiveChat provides intuitive conversational tools accessible via a web browser, app, or mobile device. Their newest offering, ChatBot, adds automated messaging to this service. More specifically, it provides the following features:

• Lead collection using interactive media-rich messages
• Customers can leave a message, create an account, reset their password, etc., via the chatbot.
• Answer questions in a timely fashion
• Book appointments
• Create customer support tickets when agents aren’t available
• Easily transition shoppers to a live agent
• Run A/B testing to find out which responses work best.

You can create an AI bot with LiveChat using their drag-and-drop visual builder. The builder simplifies how you coordinate the flow of bot conversations. It begins with the chat’s starting point. Then you simply drag in responses and actions accordingly. Best of all, the discussion becomes increasingly personalized as the bot gathers more and more data about the customer.

You can add LiveChat to your Shopify store by downloading it from the Shopify App Store. You’ll also need to download the ChatBot integration from the LiveChat marketplace. You can download the ChatBot app directly from Shopify, but you won’t have live chat capability, and there may also be additional charges.

Pricing

You can use Chatbot for free if you have a LiveChat subscription. A LiveChat subscription purchased from the Shopify App Store starts at $19 monthly with a 14-day free trial. Otherwise, if you buy directly from ChatBot, pricing starts at $65 a month when billed annually.

Zendesk Chat

With the Zendesk AI chatbot, you can program automated responses to customer inquiries when your team isn’t available. They make this simple with its conversation flow builder. Here you decide the responses users receive when interacting with your chat.

Best of all, once you’ve created your flow, you can convert it into multiple languages without a single line of code. 

You can also use this service to:

• Direct customers to relevant pages on your website in response to their queries. 
• Decipher user intent, language, and sentiment and pass this information on to a live agent
• Get AI recommendations on how agents can best support users
• Collect customer data so that live agents can better answer their problems
• Prioritize and sort customer requests, and send them to the right agent

As you can see from this list of features, Zendesk Chat isn’t an independent chatbot. Instead, it focuses more on facilitating and analyzing conversations to support your in-person customer service team.

You can easily install Zendesk Chat via the Shopify app store, and you’ll find a wealth of documentation on how to get your chatbots up and running. But if you need extra help, you can turn on AI assistance to walk you through the process.

Pricing

Zendesk Chat has a 14-day free trial. After that, you’ll have to subscribe to one of its paid service plans to use the chatbot features (all plans are billed annually).

• Suite Team – $49 a month per agent: 50 AI-powered responses per month, agent routing, and chat automations.
• Suite Growth – $79 a month per agent: 100 AI-powered responses per month, agent routing, and chat automations.
• Suite Professional – $99 a month per agent: 500 AI-powered responses per month, customizable agent routing, and chat automations.

Drift

Drift’s cloud-based conversational AI-fuelled chatbot was developed to help businesses improve their sales productivity. The bot can proactively engage with potential customers from any page on your website. To do this, they use a bot flow playbook tool that allows you to structure conversation events. You can map answers to specific questions, set conditions, and target specific audience segments to provide the best possible customer experience. 

Using the Drift bot, you can also:

• Book meetings with customers
• Provide shoppers with product guides 
• Help customers discover new products and explain their features
• Enable shoppers to provide their contact details so that you can follow up with more info

What’s great about the Drift bot is you can create VIP experiences for your loyal customers. For instance, you can integrate with your marketing automation platform to provide personalized greetings. You can also give custom sales pitches that you can A/B test to see which pitches generate the most sales conversions. 

Lastly, a Shopify integration is available on all Drift plans. However, installing it is more complex than simply downloading it from Shopify’s App Store. Instead, you have to install it as a Javascript widget in your Shopify account settings. That said, Drift offers thorough self-help documentation to guide you through this process as well as onboarding.

Pricing

You can trial Drift’s services with a free plan, but unfortunately, it doesn’t include using chatbots. For that, you will need one of their paid plans:

• Premium – $2,500 a month: It includes the chatbot builder, real-time chat notifications, and a landing page builder.
• Advanced – Custom pricing: Everything in the Premium plan, plus A/B testing, advanced agent routing, and a dedicated customer service manager.
• Enterprise – Custom pricing: Everything above, plus AI-powered chatbots with human-like conversation ability, flexible agent routing, and your own cloud-based workspace.

They also have a startup program for fledgling businesses. However, you’ll need to apply for this program to see if you qualify.

Gobot

Gobot helps you ask your customers the right questions and recommend the best solutions for their needs, eradicating the guesswork when it comes to trying to decipher what your customers want. Needless to say, this goes a long way to ensuring you can upsell more efficiently. For instance, the chatbot can utilize visual images to ask them about their hair color, skin type, hobbies, and more. 

Gobot employs machine learning to adapt to your customer’s expectations and can: 

• Quickly answer customer questions
• Collect contact information
• Recommend tailored product choices
• Provide tracking information for orders
• Create customer support tickets for live agents
• Collect customer surveys

It’s an excellent choice for eCommerce because it equips you with plenty of self-service tools. For example, if a customer wants to know when their order is due, they simply ask Gobot, and it will pull the information from your carrier (you must connect your carrier first).

You can add Gobot directly to your Shopify store by downloading it from the App Store with just a few clicks. Once installed, you can edit the chatbot’s design by adapting the style, color, and text in the editor or by accessing the CSS code.

Pricing

Gobot is free to install and use for up to 5,000 engagements. Afterwhich, you’ll need to contact the Gobot team to get a quote for the price of their services.

Relish AI

Relish.AI is an AI-powered chat assistant designed with Shopify in mind. You can guide customers through conversations using predefined questions and responses. This allows you to both manage shopper inquiries and approach customers as they traverse your store. 

The Relish bot is built to help you:

• Provide answers to product FAQs
• Automate customer support when your live team isn’t available to provide around-the-clock service
• Assist in product discovery
• Help process returns, exchanges, and cancellations
• Transfer customers to live agents when needed
• Upsell products

Using Relish, you can set up complete campaigns designed to bring in leads and sales. For instance, Relish furnishes you with pre-designed welcome, exit, product, and newsletter campaigns made to engage and re-engage customers. 

You can install Relish by downloading it from the Shopify App Store. From there, you can connect Relish with your Shopify Inbox (you can download the inbox function here) to manage all your interactions from one place and assign live agents to address issues where needed. 

Pricing

Relish has a 14-day free trial. After that, you’ll have to choose from one of their paid plans which are billed either monthly or yearly. If you opt for the latter, you’ll benefit from a 17% discount. 

We’ve quoted the cost of monthly billing below:

• Growth – $29 monthly: FAQ chatbot, integration with your Shopify inbox, and welcome, newsletter, and exit sales campaigns.
• Pro – $99 a month: All the above, plus access to the bot flow editor, product campaigns, full access to the AI library, and a Klaviyo integration.
• Premium – $299 a month: Everything above, plus product-level chatbot FAQs, custom sales campaigns, product quizzes, and VIP support.
• Enterprise – $599 a month: All the above plus custom AI training, a dedicated account manager, and order management.

Gorgias

Gorgias provides customer service agents with a way to automate their workflows. It’s devised to automatically send personalized messages to customers based on pre-defined rules and/or triggers. It can also distinguish the subject matter of a user’s inquiry and direct them to the right agent.

You can also use Gorgias to:

• Answer frequently asked questions
• Update customers on their order status
• Allow customers to initiate returns and order cancellations
• Pass on the intent and sentiment of customer inquiries to your customer service team
• Centralize your inbox to manage messages from multiple channels from the convenience of one place

The most beneficial aspect of Gorgias is that you can deploy chat automations across multiple channels, giving you more control over your workflow. For example, not only can you use Georgias to manage your live chat, but you can also continue the conversation across SMS, email, and social media. You can also send out responses in bulk and reply on whatever channels suit your customer.

It’s easy to install and start running on Gorgias on your Shopify store. You just download it from the App Store. 

Pricing

Gorgias has a seven-day free trial. After that, there’s a selection of paid plans available on monthly or yearly billing. The paid plans start at $10 a month (monthly billing), but it’s important to note that packages don’t automatically come with full automation features. You need the automation add-on to access auto-response and self-service order tracking and cancellation. You have to add this in addition to your paid plan, which costs $180 per month. 

But, without this add-on, you can create chat rules and answer FAQs – even on the Starter plan.

Choosing the Best AI Chatbots for Shopify

With so many chatbots available, it’s easy to get overwhelmed. So, here are a few things to keep in mind when choosing the best AI chatbots for Shopify:

To choose the best chatbot for Shopify, you first need to figure out your goals:

• Do you want a chatbot to help you with product recommendations or sales? 
• Are you looking for customer service assistance?
• Are you looking for a chatbot to help with transactions? 

The most important thing is to figure out what you want your chatbot to do and then work backward from there. Once you know what you want, it’s much easier to pick the right service for your needs.

For instance, Zendesk might be an excellent choice to help your team if they struggle with large volumes of tickets. In contrast, LiveChat’s bot might be better if you’re more interested in generating leads.

So tell us, which do you think are the best AI chatbots for Shopify on our list? Tell us your thoughts in the comments box below!