13 Best Live Chat Widgets for your Ecommerce Store
Mwendwa Bundi Emma
Posted on December 29, 2022
A live chat widget is a chat box found on websites that works as a communication channel for customers as an alternative to the e-mail way of customer support. This feature has revolutionized how business is done by providing real-time responses between buyers and sellers.
Specifically for ecommerce websites, adding a live-chat widget builds a trustworthy image of your brand to your customers. It comforts them to know that they can reach you for any questions they might have.
This article highlights thirteen (13) live chat widgets for your ecommerce store to drive more sales and customer satisfaction.
Benefits of Using Live Chat Widgets in Ecommerce
It allows merchants and businesses to help their customers in real-time. This improves the customer experience.
Since customers can get their questions answered in real-time, their concerns or queries can be resolved while they’re shopping. This encourages the customer to make their purchase, which reduces the number of abandoned carts.
Providing quick real-time answers builds the customer’s trust in your brand. Coupled with a successful purchasing experience, it can lead to customer loyalty as well.
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What is Medusa
Medusa is a set of commerce modules and tools that allow you to build rich, reliable, and performant commerce applications without reinventing core commerce logic. The modules can be customized and used to build advanced ecommerce stores, marketplaces, or any product that needs foundational commerce primitives. All modules are open-source and freely available on npm.
Medusa offers bespoke ecommerce infrastructure that can be used to build custom ecommerce setups. The platform is built with a developer-first focus ensuring devs have the best foundation to build scaleable ecommerce setups.
The platform is headless and its composable nature makes it easy to integrate with your favorite commerce tools from payments to search, CMS and more.
In this regard, Medusa also allows for you to pick and choose any live chat widget to use for your Medusa setup. Below is a list of some of the best chat widgets to check out in 2023.
1. Chatwoot
Chatwoot is an open source customer engagement suite that allows you to provide a great customer service experience. You can also take charge of your data by choosing to self-host Chatwoot on your server.
Chatwoot provides many powerful features such as automated messages, multi-language support, customizing the widget to fit your brand, and much more.
Chatwoot also allows you to connect with popular communication channels including Facebook, Gmail, and Twitter.
All of Chatwoots' features are spread over a range of different pricing plans from $0 to $99 billed annually.
2. Zendesk
Zendesk is a customer support live-chat solution that allows customers to choose their most favorable communication channel, including a direct call option.
Zendesk provides Customer Relationship Management (CRM) through Zendesk Sell. It allows you to further track your customer interactions and keep the sales reps more organized.
Such CRM data allows you to provide more personalized services to your customers, thus building stronger and lasting ties.
On top of the basic live-chat features, Zendesk also provides an AI Chatbot that allows merchants to always provide help to their customers even if non of their agents are currently available.
Through the Zendesk Marketplace, as a developer, you are able to access thousands of prebuilt apps and integrations. The Developer API also allows you to build custom apps.
Zendesk offers its solutions based on tiers ranging from small and medium businesses to startups and enterprises among others.
3. Rocket.Chat
Rocket.Chat is an open source fully-customizable communications platform. Customers may reach out to you via different communication points, and with Rocket.Chat, you are able to manage all of their conversations from a single point.
It also allows merchants to keep track of the chat performance for both the client and service agents through its analytics and monitoring tools.
Rocket.Chat offers a free tier community plan. They also offer enterprise and chat engine paid tiers.
4. Hubspot
Hubspot powers all your customer relationship management through Hubspot's Service Hub which is built for customer service. It gives you a unified view of each customer interaction ranging from custom surveys to reports and customer feedback on delivered service.
It helps you support, grow, and retain your customers as a merchant.
In addition, you can keep track of your email marketing by getting to know when leads are generated from the sent emails. It also allows customers to schedule meetings with the sales team via a scheduling link.
Hubspot offers merchants a free plan for all their live chat widget needs and fairly-priced paid plans with more features to optimize their customer experience.
5. Tidio
Tidio provides more than 35 pre-designed chatbots to help drive greater customer service and increased sales. Being able to automate almost half of your conversations through their Virtual AI Supporter means generating leads at any given time.
It also allows you to export all your visitors’ data, with their permission, to a .csv file. This helps keep a record of your buyers and prospective buyers for better follow-up.
Tidio also allows you to keep track of a customer's preferences by allowing you to track what they are browsing for. It has real-time data and a focused knowledge base that helps merchants send personalized follow-up messages to their visitors based on their preferences.
Tidio is also made customizable for all your mobile devices thus ensuring a top-notch user experience regardless of the user's device. Tidio has a free plan and offers a wide range of integration tools and platforms for your ecommerce site.
6. LiveChat
LiveChat makes it easier to convert website visitors into successful sales and build strong seller-customer relations.
It allows your support team to send the products in question right to your customers through the product card system. This is followed by a checkout system that facilitates a purchase there and then.
This live chat widget has other features including a Helpdesk which provides a ticketing system. The ticketing software allows merchants the flexibility of management by bringing in support agents, tags, and priority.
Live Chat has a knowledge base feature that is tailored for both the customers and support teams. This means that customers are able to easily find answers to regular questions on their own.
Support agents can always filter through the knowledge on their end to find answers to questions they might not be conversant with at the time.
7. Help Scout
Help Scout sets itself apart by its sole focus on customer support to help grow your business. The ticketing system makes work easier for the support team to efficiently reply.
Customers’ frequent visits are utilized to provide previous conversations history and user data alongside every support request.
As an ecommerce live chat widget, Help Scout provides reporting for business leads, trending topics, and busiest hours. This ensures that merchants are able to plan properly for their ecommerce business.
With the mobile app, the sales teams can always keep up with incoming conversations from the ecommerce site. The sales team lead can also delegate tasks to the agents through the mobile version.
8. Chaport
Chaport utilizes the power of a live chat widget to power your ecommerce business. These features include a knowledge base, chatbot integrations, customization, and reporting on conversion rates for your business.
Chaport acknowledges the need for multilingual support, thus providing a multilingual chat widget, which means customers see the widget in their native languages.
For more satisfactory conversations, files including images, videos, and audio can be shared through the live chat widget.
Chaport provides customers with a myriad of social media platforms to reach out from. However, your sales agents can reply to and manage all conversations from one central place.
9. Intercom
Intercom is a customer-first ecommerce live chat widget. It powers a diversified live chat messaging that drives engagement all through to the checkout stage.
After purchase, Intercom allows for promotional messaging aimed at bringing customers back for more purchases. It also utilizes chatbots for automated and fast replies that take care of FAQs thus taking the load off your sales teams on pre-meditated questions.
Intercom also utilizes other built-in features for your ecommerce site that offer proactive support. They include mobile carousels that build on navigation assistance to help customers by showing them around.
In addition, Intercom provides customer data analytics based on behavioral and conversational data. This is key as they provide merchants with hands-on personalized information. This allows them to tailor unique shopping experiences for each customer.
10. Live Agent
Live Agent is an open source helpdesk that offers all the functionalities needed in customer service and technical support. It assists shoppers through its integrated customer support model.
Among its outstanding features is cloud phone support with on-site phone calls and video calls. This built-in call center ensures well-served customers for better customer support through increased flexibility.
Live Agent is also built for speed through its messaging sneak peek feature. It allows the sales agent a peek at what the customer is typing thus anticipating a response in record time.
Live Agent also has an advanced ticketing system that helps better manage the two sides of ecommerce websites.
The convenient single dashboard ensures that all communications streaming in from different social media accounts are managed from one place thus making sorting and managing easier for the team.
11. SendinBlue
SendinBlue is an ecommerce live chat widget built for customer support, sales, and marketing. It incorporates targeted means such as sign-up forms and dedicated landing forms for each campaign to drive customer retention.
Sendinblue employs machine learning models to perfect different CRM tasks such as send time optimization.
The segmentation feature employed by SendinBlue allows merchants to send marketing emails to a more targeted audience based on their likes and preferences.
Through the live chat widget, ecommerce websites can go a step further to attract and retain customers by integrating signup forms that collect information from your customers better.
12. ChatBot
ChatBot is powered by artificial intelligence chatbots that stimulate human-like conversations with your customers. This widget also allows you to integrate marketing and analytics tools to drive further growth and sales for your site.
Being a chatbot, you can easily integrate it with other live chat widgets that double up with the human touch service. You can easily get ChatBot up and running by using the AI-powered visual builder to build your chatbot.
ChatBot offers a 14-day free trial with no credit cards requirements to its customers.
13. Freshdesk
Freshdesk provides omnichannel customer support management. It is built with both the customers and support agents in mind for an all-around experience.
It provides many features including a Freshdesk contact center that offers voice call services. Voice call services provide a closer relationship for ecommerce shoppers, something that is rare in online shopping.
This live chat tool is further powered by voice bots that lighten the workload for the staff.
The Freshdesk support feature allows for agent routing and collaboration between agents for fasters replies thus guaranteeing customer satisfaction.
Freshdesk offers a free trial valid for 21 days where users can later upscale to the paid version.
Integrate Live Chat Widgets with Medusa
As Medusa is an open source composable commerce platform, it’s much more flexible to integrate third-party services and tools into your ecommerce store.
Medusa’s architecture is decoupled, meaning that the frontend and backend are built and hosted separately. When you choose to integrate a live chat widget, you can choose the best tool for you and integrate it into your storefront.
This would not affect the backend and would allow you to provide the best user experience for your customers on the storefront.
Live chat widgets have revolutionized ecommerce businesses. Integrating these valuable widgets into your ecommerce storefront goes a long way in driving increased sales and positive customer experience for your store.
This guarantees that, as a merchant, you can convert visitors to customers and returning customers as well.
Should you have any questions in relation to Medusa, please feel free to reach out to the Medusa team via Discord.
