You have an ecommerce business, and now it’s time to grow it—
Starting from providing customer service that delights customers, all the way to boosting your sales. But can live chat for ecommerce help you with all that?
Sure, it can.
But where to start your search for the best ecommerce live chat to fit your business?
Right here!
We’ll show you all you need to know about ecommerce chat and go through the best software for your business with pros, cons, and pricing comparisons.
Increase sales on your ecommerce site with the best live chat out there
First off—
What is ecommerce live chat?
Ecommerce live chat software is a small window on your online store’s website that enables you to communicate with your website visitors. It usually consists of a pop-up chat button that, once clicked, displays a messaging box for your potential customers.
It’s useful when shoppers have questions about your products or need help navigating your pages. Moreover, a live chat app can provide answers to FAQs and direct people to your knowledge base for more detailed guides.
Live chat is crucial for customer service in ecommerce as it improves the experience and increases trust in your online store. This can help you increase sales as buyers will feel more secure purchasing from you.
Thanks to ecommerce live chat, your customer support team members can monitor the system, organize inquiries, and ensure all questions and concerns are answered. Ecommerce chat can also increase your conversion rates faster than you ever thought possible.
Read more: Learn more about what live chat is and how it works.
Okay—
To better picture what we’re talking about, here are a few real-life examples of stores with live chat:
Whisker Bag uses its ecommerce live chat to encourage website visitors to chat with the company before the potential client leaves the store. It’s a great way to decrease bounce rates and increase conversions.
Read more: Check out this case study about how Whisker Bag boosted its email subscriptions and built a customer-centric business using ecommerce live chat.
This ecommerce business decided to put their lead generation on autopilot by using live chat to collect prospects for them. This is an easy way to gather more email addresses of potential customers for your next marketing campaign.
The live chat for ecommerce on Herbal Goodness’ website provides assistance to visitors as well as collects subscribers for their mailing list. This way, Herbal Goodness supports their potential customers while, at the same time, tempts them with promotions to boost their lead generation.
Now—let’s look at some of the benefits of live chat for ecommerce backed up by data.
Why is live chat for ecommerce important?
This is a common question that online businesses ask when they first hear about ecommerce chat. But once they install the chat box on their website and start using it, the results speak for themselves. Some of the most prevalent outcomes are increased sales, improved customer satisfaction, and saved time.
Here are a few reasons why using ecommerce live chat software for your online store is important:
- Saves time for you and your clients
Believe it or not, but having to wait on hold is one of the top client frustrations when it comes to customer support. And it annoys over 33% of shoppers. On top of that, about 50% of buyers prefer to use online chat from all customer communication channels available.
By using ecommerce live chat support you can slash shoppers’ waiting times and answer customer queries more efficiently. Your support agents can also answer multiple inquiries simultaneously and see the customer’s history to solve their issues quicker. Some live chat software also provides chatbots to automate ecommerce processes and make your team’s work even more effective.
- Converts visitors into leads
Another one of the benefits of live chat for ecommerce is that it can help you generate leads and increase checkouts. In fact, about 4% of website visitors can turn into leads when you use live chat with chatbot capabilities. You can use this functionality by adding pre-chat forms and lead-generation bots to your pages.
Read more: Discover some of the top use cases for chatbots and learn how to get the most out of your bots.
Speaking of increased sales—over 79% of businesses state that implementing live chat positively impacted their customer loyalty, revenue, and sales. And implementing live chat on your site might be the easiest way to improve conversion rates out there as it takes less than two minutes.
- Provides valuable insights
Customer insights usually consist of contact data, pages visited, and customer satisfaction. You can collect them by implementing pre-chat forms. And when it comes to pages visited, you’ll have this shown automatically on the visitor’s profile when they contact you. You can also add surveys at the end of each chat to gather more customer feedback each time they interact with you.
What’s the advantage of this? Well—for starters, over 89% of shoppers want to be able to give feedback and about 77% of buyers will have a more favorable view of your brand if you ask for their feedback. People like being listened to, so give them the opportunity to speak up. And by saving their information, you can help them better in the future to improve their experience with your store.
- Helps with proactive customer support
This is important because proactive chat can lead to over 105% ROI (return on investment). So, thanks to reaching out to shoppers and sending follow-ups to them, you can see your investment in the chat service pay off very quickly.
What’s more, customers appreciate proactive communication as well. About 94% of clients to whom you reach out proactively are somewhat or very satisfied with the experience. Think about it—wouldn’t you like it if a business started chatting and checked up on you without the need to ask for it?
- Shoppers expect it
Do you expect to see a chat widget on an ecommerce website? If the answer is yes, then you’re one of the 41% of buyers who expect live chat on a business site.
And they like using it. In fact, around 82% of customers are satisfied with their live chat experience. You can compare that to the mere 61% of shoppers that are happy with their email interaction and 44% of clients that enjoyed their phone communication.
And remember, happy client means happy business. This is shown even clearer with 91% of buyers that are more likely to make a repeat purchase with your brand after a positive experience.
So, which software to use to enjoy all these benefits of live chat for ecommerce?
Let’s find out!
Best ecommerce live chat for your store
The solution you choose needs to have all the features that your business requires, match your budget, and have a friendly user interface. There are many live chat software for ecommerce stores that offer a free plan, so even start-ups can use chat on their website to grow their business.
Here’s a comparison table of the best ecommerce live chat software:
| Name | Rating | Free plan | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tidio | 4.7/5 ⭐️ (1,160+ reviews) | ✅ | Small to medium businesses |
| LiveAgent | 4.5/5 ⭐️ (1,380+ reviews) | ✅ | Account permissions and management |
| Gorgias | 4.6/5 ⭐️ (375+ reviews) | ❌ | Ecommerce platforms integration |
| Tawk.to | 4.6/5 ⭐️ (155+ reviews) | ✅ | Start-ups |
| LiveChat | 4.5/5 ⭐️ (735+ reviews) | ❌ | Chat supervision |
| Zoho Desk | 4.4/5 ⭐️ (3,855+ reviews) | ✅ | Ticketing system |
| Intercom | 4.4/5 ⭐️ (2,255+ reviews) | ❌ | Larger businesses |
| HubSpot | 4.4/5 ⭐️ (1,255+ reviews) | ✅ | Customer databases |
| Freshchat | 4.4/5 ⭐️ (235+ reviews) | ✅ | Automated email campaigns |
| HappyFox | 4.4/5 ⭐️ (100+ reviews) | ❌ | Website visitors’ monitoring |
| Zendesk | 4.3/5 ⭐️ (4,415+ reviews) | ❌ | Queue and chat management |
| Olark | 4.3/5 ⭐️ (220+ reviews) | ❌ | Extensive analytics |
| Liveperson | 3.6/5 ⭐️ (60+ reviews) | ❌ | Multichannel communication |
Now—time to look at the in-depth reviews of each of the ecommerce live chat solutions.
1. Tidio
Ratings: 4.7/5 ⭐️ (1,160+ reviews)
Hold on a second—isn’t this our software?
You’re right, it is. And we know that this blog article isn’t the right place to promote ourselves. So, instead, we’ll keep the introduction short and just encourage you to check our ecommerce live chat for yourself free of charge. You can also look through our reviews to decide whether we should be on this spot on the list.
Tidio offers a live chat system enhanced with chatbots to improve your customer engagement and sales generation. It also provides a shared inbox for all of your communication coming from different channels, such as Facebook Messenger, Instagram, and your site.
On top of that, this ecommerce live chat analyzes customer behaviors and satisfaction to give you reports for a full view of your results. This can also help you reach out to visitors, provide proactive customer service, and even slash shopping cart abandonment rates.
Main features:
- Ecommerce integrations with platforms including Shopify, WooCommerce, and BigCommerce
- Multichannel shared inbox to respond to all your customers from a single place
- Visitor notifications to provide proactive customer service
- Website visitors’ live view to see pages they visit
- Mobile app for iOS and Android to provide customer service on the go
- Visitor profiles with information such as location, contact details, and visited pages
- 7-day free trial available
- Free version available
- Starter ($29/mo)
- Growth (starts at $59/mo)
- Plus (starts at $749/mo)
- Premium (starts at $2999/mo)
Skip the list and pick the best live chat for your ecommerce business
Read more: Learn how to install Tidio live chat on your Shopify store in under 2 minutes.
2. LiveAgent
Ratings: 4.5/5 ⭐️ (1,380+ reviews)
LiveAgent is an open-source helpdesk that integrates with social media and messaging platforms, such as Facebook Messenger, Twitter, Slack, and Viber. It also offers voice integration, email piping, and email templates.
This ecommerce chat also supports your agents with ticket management and prioritization. It provides a ticketing system for better task organization and faster resolution of queries from a single system.
Pros:
- Spam filters to protect you from phishing attacks, scams, viruses, and malware
- Role permissions and settings to manage the accounts effectively
- Centralized ticketing system to organize and resolve inquiries in one place
Cons:
- Some reviewers state that the UI design is outdated
- Limited integrations with other platforms
- Free version available
- Ticket ($15/agent/month)
- Ticket+Chat ($29/agent/month)
- All-inclusive ($49/agent/month)
3. Gorgias
Ratings: 4.6/5 ⭐️ (375+ reviews)
This is a CRM (customer relationship management) software that is dedicated to ecommerce businesses. It provides a shared inbox workspace for all your chat agents to make the interactions with clients more efficient.
This is one of the best live chat software for ecommerce that comes with an impressive suite of analytics features, such as social media sentiment analysis to see how users refer to your business. It also seamlessly integrates with Shopify, BigCommerce, and Magento.
Pros:
- Seamless integration with ecommerce platforms, such as Shopify, Magento, BigCommerce
- Advanced analytics like social media sentiment analysis
- Marketing chatbot templates available
Cons:
- Only suitable for ecommerce businesses
- Reviewers report technical difficulties caused by frequent system updates
- Basic ($60/month)
- Pro ($360/month)
- Advanced ($900/month)
- Enterprise → contact sales team
4. Tawk.to
Ratings: 4.6/5 ⭐️ (155+ reviews)
This live chat for ecommerce websites is completely free to use, which makes it a perfect solution for small businesses and start-ups. It offers monitoring of your website visitors’ activities to provide personalized and well-timed support. Tawk.to also lets you hire agents by the hour from their system if you need support with providing fast customer service. You can also use this live chat on a mobile device, both iOS and Android apps are available.
Pros:
- Multilingual with over 45 language translations available
- Fully customizable chat widget
- Real-time view of website visitors and data on how often they visit your site
Cons:
- Some reviewers report inconsistent notifications about messages
- Limited reports
- Free to use
5. LiveChat
Ratings: 4.5/5 ⭐️ (735+ reviews)
As the name indicates, this is a ecommerce helpdesk that focuses on live chat customer support. It’s best suited for medium to large businesses that will find the detailed reports on each agent’s performance and customer satisfaction scores useful.
This ecommerce live chat software provides a ticketing system, customizable chat widget, and canned responses to enhance your customer communication. It also lets visitors book appointments with you via a self-service tool.
Pros:
- Chat supervision to overlook interactions with your customers
- Canned responses, product carousels, and message templates with buttons
- In-chat customer satisfaction surveys and chat ratings
Cons:
- Technical difficulties with the mobile app
- Limits on the number of customers in queues, additional requests redirected to other channels
- Starter ($19/mo/agent)
- Team ($39/mo/agent)
- Business ($59/mo/agent)
- Enterprise → contact sales team
6. Zoho Desk
Ratings: 4.4/5 ⭐️ (3,855+ reviews)
Zoho Desk is a cloud-based CRM solution with ticketing system functionality. It offers a time tracker, auto-tagging, and canned responses to improve your customer interactions. This live chat tool for ecommerce provides analytics, metrics, and forecasting to stay on top of your results. It also lets you measure the customer experience and get to know what needs improvements.
Pros:
- Advanced dashboards and reports
- Time tracker to measure the customer’s waiting time
- Interactive Voice Response (IVR) for call centers
Cons:
- Sometimes there are issues with integrating other platforms into Zoho
- Can be considered complicated to use
- Free version available
- Standard ($20/agent/month)
- Professional ($35/agent/month)
- Enterprise ($50/agent/month)
7. Intercom
Ratings: 4.4/5 ⭐️ (2,255+ reviews)
This live chat for retail/ecommerce is perfect for large businesses and SaaS companies. It’s diverse and adaptable, which helps to match your business needs. Intercom comes with lead qualification system and customer segmentation to help you increase sales by converting more leads. It also offers custom APIs, Service Level Agreements, and ticket workflows to improve your customer communications. And then, you can track your results with extensive analytics.
Pros:
- Customer support ticket workflows to better categorize and track them
- Sales enablement tools to increase conversion rates
- Chat conversation ratings to monitor representatives’ performance
Cons:
- Merging and duplicating conversations is not possible
- Steep learning curve
- Contact sales for demos and custom pricing
8. HubSpot
Ratings: 4.4/5 ⭐️ (1,255+ reviews)
HubSpot is one of the best live chat for ecommerce businesses that also offers an inbound marketing system. It lets you categorize customer inquiries and build customer databases. It also records visitors’ information, so your support team knows previous issues the client had which speaking to them. You can use these features and AI chatbots to improve your customer relationships and gain more happy clients.
Pros:
- Customer information stored in an inbox to provide personalized experiences in the future
- Many integrations, such as Slack, Eventbrite, and SurveyMonkey
- Wide range of marketing and sales tools, including mass email campaigns and landing page builders
Cons:
- Some users had issues with the ticketing system (didn’t reopen tickets after they were viewed and couldn’t categorize tickets)
- Limited customer support on the free version
- Free version available
- Starter ($45/mo)
- Professional ($450/mo)
- Enterprise ($1,200/mo)
9. Freshchat
Ratings: 4.4/5 ⭐️ (235+ reviews)
This ecommerce live chat provides CRM features as well as sales enablement technology. It offers personalized and automated email campaigns to improve your conversion rates and customer satisfaction.
It also helps you qualify leads and customers to see who you should focus most on. This cloud-based software gives you visitor-context tools, such as event timelines, social media, and contact details, so you can have a better understanding of your shoppers.
Pros:
- Ticket merging and assignment to specific support agents
- Advanced insights, analytics, and forecasting
- Highly customizable to match your business needs
Cons:
- User interface is a little challenging to navigate
- Some reviewers say they had troubles with data synchronization
- Free version available
- Growth ($18/agent/month)
- Pro ($47/agent/month)
- Enterprise ($83/agent/month)
10. HappyFox
Ratings: 4.4/5 ⭐️ (100+ reviews)
HappyFox helps you connect with your website visitors at the right time thanks to the visitors’ monitoring and live chat capabilities. This can help you with customer engagement and boost your sales straight from your site.
On top of that, it provides a fully customizable widget as well as chatbots to reduce the volume of customer queries going to your agents. This live chat for ecommerce also offers concurrent chat, pre-chat forms, and unlimited chat history to improve your team’s efforts.
Pros:
- Desktop and mobile (iOS and Android) apps to answer queries on the go
- AI chatbots available to automate workflows
- Website visitors’ monitoring
Cons:
- Limited reporting
- Some reviewers say the UI needs improvements (like the chat message box needs to be bigger to see the whole message before sending it to the customer)
- Mighty ($39/agent/mo)
- Fantastic ($59/agent/mo)
- Enterprise ($79/agent/mo)
- Enterprise Plus ($99/agent/mo)
11. Zendesk
Ratings: 4.3/5 ⭐️ (4,415+ reviews)
Zendesk offers omnichannel customer interaction tools and automation features to improve your team’s efficiency. It provides team collaborations, pre-chat surveys, and role permissions for your support agents for better management of your customer communication.
This ecommerce live chat lets you customize API actions to perform custom tasks. This will help you extend the software’s functionality even further. It also has an AI assistant, Freddy, that automates some of the processes related to customer service.
Pros:
- Escalation management system with alerts
- Queue management and chat routing to organize incoming messages
- Offline pre-chat forms to gather customer data
Cons:
- Service disruptions at times
- Automatic closure of tickets after 30 days
- Suite Team ($49/agent/month)
- Suite Growth ($79/agent/month)
- Suite Professional ($99/agent/month)
12. Olark
Ratings: 4.3/5 ⭐️ (220+ reviews)
This is a user-friendly live chat tool for ecommerce that provides extensive analytics and reporting. These can help you analyze chat volume, customer satisfaction score, and agent activity.
Also, you will get actionable insights from surveys and pre-chat forms. This way, you’ll be able to improve your offerings and increase sales quicker. Olark offers chat transcripts to help you catch and eliminate the recurring issues with customer feedback.
Pros:
- Archive for transcripts to save conversations into a customer database, search through and review them
- Automated massages including welcome messages and promotions
- Many integrations, including Zapier, MailChimp, and Google Analytics
Cons:
- Users report workflow challenges including difficulties collaborating with colleagues
- Some issues with offline/away displays when users are online and available
- Standard ($29/mo/seat)
- Pro → contact sales team
Read more: Look through the best Olark alternatives to choose the right option for your business
13. Liveperson
Ratings: 3.6/5 ⭐️ (60+ reviews)
Liveperson is a messaging platform that combines live chat with chatbots, SMS, and instant messaging apps. It’s also compatible with major messaging platforms, such as WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and Apple Business Chat.
This live chat for ecommerce enables your customers to make payments directly in the chat. Just imagine, your customers see a product pop up from the chat widget and can just click two buttons to have it on the way to them. This can help you boost your sales and improve the shopping experience for your clients.
Pros:
- Multichannel communication vie live chat, Facebook Messenger, Twitter, WhatsApp, Google’s Business Messages, and Apple Business Chat
- Sentiment Analytics report to measure customer satisfaction with your brand
- AI chatbots available to automate some of your workflows
Cons:
- Poor customer support
- Grouping chats is not possible
- Contact sales for custom pricing
Tips on how to choose the right ecommerce live chat for your business
Some of the best practices when it comes to choosing the best live chat for your ecommerce business include:
- Check the list of features
First of all, you should make a list of desired functionalities for your ecommerce website that live chat can fulfill. These could include automated welcome messages, having a live view of your visitors, and being able to go back to your chat history.
Once you create that list, you will have a better idea of what you’re looking for in your ecommerce live chat. So, make sure the platform you choose offers all the features you need. The other functionalities will be a nice bonus, but the essential ones need to be provided.
- Consider the pricing
You should know your budget for this software at the start of your search. This might eliminate quite a few of the competitors. Always check if the pricing of the ecommerce live chat matches your budget and estimate the return on investment you’re looking to get.
It’s also a good idea to check if there’s a free plan or a free trial to test the system before committing to it. Once you have all the options drawn out, compare their pricing to what they offer. You might find that some providers charge way more than others for the same functionalities.
- Check the reviews about customer support
When you first use live chat software, you will need some help to get the most out of it. Some of the questions you might ask start from “how to add contacts to the system”, all the way to “where are the account settings on the dashboard?” And looking for the answers yourself will cost you too much time and frustration.
So, during your search for the best ecommerce live chat for your business, you should check the current users’ reviews about customer service. You can go onto the provider’s G2 page, scroll to the Reviews section, and search for Customer service. Then read through, starting from the most recent reviews.
- See if it offers the necessary integrations
Do you want to use the live chat feature only on your website, or do you want to add it to your social media and other messaging platforms?
You should check if the software you’re considering has integrations with Facebook Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp, Telegram, and email to ensure you can sync all of your customer communication in one place. Other useful integrations include Google Analytics and Zapier to easily track your data and link to platforms easily.
Read more:
- Discover how to use the Facebook Messenger integration with live chat.
- Learn more about Instagram chatbots and how to use them.
Key takeaway
For a quick recap—
Ecommerce live chat is a messaging window on your online store’s site to interact with your website visitors and returning customers. You can use it to generate leads, boost sales, and improve customer satisfaction.
To provide the best live chat customer service, you need great software to communicate with. The top live chat for ecommerce include:
- Tidio
- LiveAgent
- Gorgias
- Tawk.to
- LiveChat
- Zoho Desk
- Intercom
- HubSpot
- Freshchat
- HappyFox
- Zendesk
- Liveperson
Just remember—before you commit to the provider, first check if they offer the needed features, whether their pricing matches your budget, and what their support team is like.
So, go through the list, pick the top 3 ecommerce live chat software that matches your business, and try them out during the free trial period. This is probably the best way to check if the platform matches your needs, or if you should switch to a different one.
Skip the list and pick the best live chat for your ecommerce business
