This article is for you, Shopify store owners, looking for an affordable and effective AI chatbot solution for customer support.
Here we compare the top three AI chatbots, Shopify Inbox Chatbot, Tidio and Gorgias, while also adding in the new kid on the block KorticalChat — focusing on its automation capabilities, pricing and user experience. Our goal is to help you choose the right chatbot to enhance your store's operations and customer satisfaction.
Set the Scene - Chatbot vs Live Agent vs Conversational AI Chatbot
A chatbot is a computer program that simulates human conversation, embedded in your website, and in this article we are talking specifically about Shopify stores, to automate customer support, increase sales, and improve user experience.
The traditional chatbot has had some logic and customer flows to handle common customer questions and are quite limited in their understanding as they are not smart. They can be 24/7 and handle a small % of common customer inquiries but fall down for anything not preprogrammed and can be quite robotic in their replies.
Live Agents are powered by people so they are fully flexible to the customer needs but there can be a long wait time for busy periods and are only available during business hours.
The next generation of chatbots, often called next-gen AI Chatbots, are automated and conversational. Powered by Large Language Models and Natural Language Processing, they are intelligent, adaptable, and sometimes enhanced with RAG capabilities to learn and retrieve information from your data. These chatbots work 24/7 and reply in most commonly spoken languages.
Benefits of Using Conversational AI Chatbots for Your Shopify Store
Interactive way to service your customers
Whether it is live chat or next-gen AI chatbot, having a chatbot easily accessible for customers to interact with is a huge bonus to customers seeking further information to either help them buy or help them follow up with a purchase.
Improve customer satisfaction through 24/7 availability
- Provide immediate answers, even outside business hours, to increase customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Enhance customer interactions with personalised responses
- Use natural language processing to understand customer queries and provide personalised responses, enhancing customer interactions and experience.
Increase sales through efficient customer inquiries handling
- Handle customer inquiries efficiently, reducing the risk of losing potential sales due to delayed or inadequate responses.
Enhance customer support with automated responses
- Automate routine customer support tasks, freeing up human agents to focus on complex issues and improving overall customer support.
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Types of Chatbots for Shopify Stores
Live Agent chatbots: How they work and their limitations
- Rule-based chatbots use pre-loaded conversational flows to respond to user interactions, but they are limited in their ability to handle complex customer inquiries and thus only automate a small percentage of customer questions.
Conversational AI-powered chatbots: How they work and their benefits
- Conversational AI-powered chatbots use natural language processing and machine learning to understand human language, providing more sophisticated and human-like responses. They have the power to understand the conversation so they are able to automate much larger proportions of the customer queries. They are often
Top Shopify Chatbot Options
Shopify Chatbot - Inbox Messaging App: Omni channel customer support chatbot
The ecommerce giant offers their online store owners built-in chatbot functionality through their Shopify Inbox. Merchants can create customised chatbot scripts using a visual builder to provide product recommendations, answer FAQs, guide customers through checkout, and more.
- Key positive - it is free! If you’re just starting out, haven’t yet built up the traffic and just want a simple chatbot that answers some FAQ, then this is a great tool to start with. You'll receive alerts whenever someone interacts with the chatbot, allowing you to promptly respond to potential clients. Conveniently, the tool is accessible both on mobile and desktop, ensuring you can stay connected from anywhere.
- Key negative - If your store consistently receives significant traffic where you get at least 20 messages a day, or you have multiple stores you’re managing, manning the inbox manually can quickly become overwhelming. Prompt responses are essential for maintaining customer engagement, yet Shopify Inbox lacks the automation to handle personalised inquiries such as specific product questions or issues beyond basic FAQs. The customisations are not flexible so any customer queries that are outside of the pre-filled questions cannot be answered and you’ll always need man power to manage the inbox.
Tidio: Chatbot and live chat platform for Shopify
- One of the earlier players in the space, Tidio offers both live chat and AI chatbot functionality. Their visual chatbot builder with a drag-and-drop interface makes it easy to create customised conversational flows without coding.
- Key Positive: Tidio's offers both Tidio live chat which is their most popular feature and more recently Lyro AI chatbot functionality. They are experts at live chat and its offering is really affordable with pricing starting at just $19/month, making it accessible for smaller businesses. They have integrations with facebook messenger and with whatsapp so you can manage chats in one location.
- Key Negative: Tidio's AI chatbots, while initially appealing for automating website support, can quickly become prohibitively expensive. They offer the first 50 chats for free, but these can be rapidly depleted by spam, with 300 Lyro conversations costing an astonishing $226 (or 210EUR) per month. Additionally, reviews have highlighted shortcomings in Tidio’s natural language processing capabilities, leading to responses that are frequently mismatched or irrelevant to the user's queries. As an affordable AI agent that automates customer support, Tidio falls short.
Gorgias: All-in-one customer ticketing and chatbot platform
- Gorgias combines Shopify chatbot functionality with a ticketing system, with a laser focus on e-commerce companies that need easy tracking and segmentation tools.
- Key Positive: Ticketing resolution first means that you only need this tool if you want to have a ticketing system and chatbot. They also have a live chatbot feature and is a no code way to get started with live chat and ticketing.
- Key Negative: They are not AI native and report that their chatbot handles 50% of resolutions meaning that you will still need a team to help support you. For automation of 333 tickets you spend $306/month plus the $306/month in the ticketing software so right now it feels like it misses the mark for an AI chatbot solution as it is not super affordable or as effective as others in the market.
KorticalChat AI: AI-powered chatbot for automated customer support
- KorticalChat is a relative newcomer in the AI chatbot space, however the company has been delivering AI solutions since 2016. With years of experience they are able to deliver superior conversational AI by leveraging state-of-the-art natural language processing and enhanced retrieval-augmented generation capabilities. The result is an AI agent that offers more than just standard chatbot functions. KorticalChat's low-code chatbot builder, seamlessly integrates with Shopify, empowers Shopify store owners to develop custom AI agents proficient in managing real-time inquiries like FAQ interactions, order tracking and even product searches. It retrieves information from your FAQ, returns, or other relevant pages automatically, enabling the chatbot to provide comprehensive and accurate responses. Because you ask it in however way you want to ask and it understands, it can offer a more informative and engaging shopping experience.
- For example, a customer can query, 'Do you have these blue trainers in black in size small?' and receive immediate, accurate answers along with the link to the product.
Key Positive: AI first company means that the AI agent is focused on providing automated answers that are accurate, chatty and empathetic so it can truly replace people in customer support with 80% of cases being resolved by the AI chatbot. Affordable option starting at £50/month for 5,000 messages.
- Key Negative: There is no AI live agent to handover to, however their details are captured and thus email follow-up is used for the 20% of cases that would like further assistance.
Observation - KorticalChat is the only provider that uses their AI chatbot on their own site
It begs the question, why does Tidio and Gorgias only use live chat, if it isn't good enough for them, will it be right for you?
Choosing the Best Integrated Shopify Chatbot App for Automated Customer Service
Key functions to consider: customer support, sales, and engagement
- Evaluate chatbot apps based on their ability to automate customer support, increase sales, and improve customer engagement. Essentially you need to ask yourself, can they replace the customer support team in your shopify store and answer customer queries to the level that you are happy with.
Factors to evaluate: pricing, integrations, and customisation
- Consider pricing, integrations with Shopify, and customisation options when choosing a chatbot app. While Shopify Inbox may be free, if it requires manpower then there is a downstream cost and others may be more expensive for their automation than hiring people, so a holistic view of costs is key.
Implementing an AI Chatbot
- All the tools above have native integrations into Shopify which make it easy to deploy as well as being hooked into the back-end to track orders.
Try a Conversational AI Chatbot for Free
Our belief is that an AI powered chatbot is the best scalable solution
- Try KorticalChat for free and see if it suits your needs. This AI chatbot is the best AI chatbot at answering your customers' questions correctly, it is affordable and no code so you can start today.
- Reach out to Barbara (Co-Founder) if you have any issues barbara.johnson@kortical.com
