Ecommerce Chatbots: What They Are and Use Cases 2024

Facebook Messenger is one of the most popular platforms for building bots, as it has a massive user base and offers a wide range of features. WhatsApp, on the other hand, is a great option if you want to reach international customers, as it has a large user base outside of the United States. Slack is another platform that’s gaining popularity, particularly among businesses that use it for internal communication.

And it’s not just individuals buying sneakers for resale—it’s an industry. The sneaker resale market is now so large, that StockX, a sneaker resale and verification platform, is valued at $4 billion. We mentioned at the beginning of this article a sneaker drop we worked with had over 1.5 million requests from bots. With that kind of money to be made on sneaker reselling, it’s no wonder why. Only when a shopper buys the product on the resale site will the bad actor have the bot execute the purchase. However, if you want a sophisticated bot with AI capabilities, you will need to train it.

Influencer product releases, collectibles, even hot tubs

Even if there was, bot developers would work tirelessly to find a workaround. That’s why just 15% of companies report their anti-bot solution retained efficacy a year after its initial deployment. Bots will even take a website offline on purpose, just to create chaos so they can slip through undetected when the website comes back online. To get a sense of scale, bot online shopping consider data from Akamai that found one botnet sent more than 473 million requests to visit a website during a single sneaker release. Bots can skew your data on several fronts, clouding up the reporting you need to make informed business decisions. And they certainly won’t engage with customer nurture flows that reduce costs needed to acquire new customers.

Like in the example above, scraping shopping bots work by monitoring web pages to facilitate online purchases. These bots could scrape pricing info, inventory stock, and similar information. A second option would be to use an online shopping bot to do that monitoring for them. The software program could be written to search for the text “In Stock” on a certain field of a web page. What all shopping bots have in common is that they provide the person using the bot with an unfair advantage.

Get the best bots services

So, choose the color of your bot, the welcome message, where to put the widget, and more during the setup of your chatbot. You can also give a name for your chatbot, add emojis, and GIFs that match your company. Now the next and most important step is to visit the product page and buy. I wrote about ScrapingBee a couple of years ago where I gave a brief intro about the service. ScrapingBee is a cloud-based scraping service that provides both headless and lightweight typical HTTP request-based scraping services. In the meantime, start building your store with a free 3-day trial of Shopify.