Increase conversions with AI Shopify chatbot: Tidio vs Inbox

Increase the conversion rate of your store using this AI Shopify chatbot | Tidio vs Shopify inbox

It turns out that by having this one feature available on your store you can boost your conversion rate by up to 7x.

Have you ever wanted to buy something online but got stuck in details?

I could look up the info on the FAQ page or the policy pages, but how interested do I have to be to invest so much energy in this purchase? As you may know, the average attention span of an adult is around 8 seconds. So if I don't have the answers in that time and my life is not dependent on those products I will most likely bounce.

After analyzing 1.25 million sales leads, a Harvard study concluded that replying to potential customers within one hour makes it seven times more likely you'll close a sale. And the shorter the time between customer inquiry and your answer the more likely it is that the customer will purchase from you.

But we are human and besides building an e-commerce empire we also need to sleep, spend time with the family, and sometimes have one or two other jobs. If you don't have a budget to hire a 24/7 support team to answer all your customer requests then you will lose a lot of sales.

Is there any way we can prevent that from happening? Glad you asked, it turns out there is. You've probably seen those little chat icons on big e-commerce sites. Live chat and chatbots are game-changers. They boost conversion rates by assisting customers through their buying journey and answering their questions.

There are many options available on the Shopify app store but in this video, I am going to talk about 2 of them. Shopify’s inbox and the smartest chatbot out there, Tidio.

I am aware that this is not a fair comparison, Tidio is a software that costed millions to develop whereas Shopify's inbox is rather a proof-of-concept app with minimal functionality. They both have their application and they do overlap in some areas but they are definitely not the same thing.

Comparing Inbox to Tidio is like comparing a landline phone to the latest iPhone. They are both phones, you can make calls and receive calls but one of them clearly does more than the other.

So can either of these chatbots actually answer your customer's questions and remove friction?

Let's make a comparison.

The main reason people turn to Shopify inbox is because it's a free Shopify app. It's a good gateway into the world of livechats and chatbots but it is quite limited. As I said before, the budget for building these two is probably a world apart.

But as it turns out, Tidio also has a free plan and for most small stores out there, this plan will be enough, at least in the beginning.

Both of them have a ticketing system, where you can assign tasks to different staff members. Tidio clearly wins here, you can connect all your communication lines including Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, and email, and never lose a lead coming from any of these. Where on Shopify inbox you can only get messages that people typed in your website’s chat box window.

In fact, Shopify inbox would not even be a chatbot if it weren't for the instant answer feature which is actually an FAQ functionality that looks as if typed by someone in the back end. I would call this Chatbot 1.0 where in Tidio, you can really dive into creating advanced chatbots that get triggered in key moments when your customer is more likely to take one action or another.

By creating a cart booster chatbot you can convince your customers to buy, by offering them a discount in the cart, you can prevent bounce rate by messaging the user when they are about to leave, you can engage a user in a conversation and find out what is holding them from buying. The list of tests you can run goes on and on.

But let's go back to the Harvard study. What happens when no support staff is online to alleviate customer friction?

The only thing Shopify Inbox can do is to display those pre-answered questions and you have to pray that the customer’s question is on that list. Other than that, you will be able to display the classical, ‘ we are not available right now, we will get in touch later’ message.

If you are a stats geek, a Forbs report says that the average response time for an online inquiry is 47 hours. Time in which your customers can easily find alternatives and your competition wins.

Here is where Tidio is shining. When your support team is offline, Tidio has a secret weapon. An AI conversational chatbot Lyro that can be trained to have conversations with your customers and potentially alleviate friction.

You can upload your FAQs and product data to Lyro, allowing it to respond to your customer inquiries by rephrasing the answers in a manner distinct from the original content you provided giving the feeling of a real conversation.

I can't say that Lyro is going to replace a real support rep but it is the next best thing.

As a bonus, built into the platform, you have an email marketing section from where you can create and send campaigns to the users collected by the Tidio widget or to your existing contacts. You have lots of templates to choose from, you can send emails right away, schedule them for later, or use the automated flows to detect user action and send a certain type of email, like a cart abandonment reminder for example. Why pay for another app to get that functionality?

And finally, I know that some of you will ask, what about the store’s speed? Isn’t Tidio going to impact the speed of my store?

I have been using both Inbox and Tidio and I can say that if anything, Shopify inbox is impacting the speed more. Tidio is not injecting their script into the head of the store as the inbox app does and instead, they give you the option to turn the widget on either from the customize dashboard or by adding the script manually before the closing of the body tag on your theme.liquid file.

Now as a bonus, and this technique is not endorsed by Tidio, I am going to show you how to load up the Tidio script on user interaction avoiding any impact that their script might have on your loading speed.

First, copy the URL from the Tidio script tag and ensure that the customize dashboard integration is turned off.

Create a snippet and name it ‘lazy_loading’. Add the code you will find here inside de snippet, include the Tidio link, and save. Then include the snippet in the head tag on your theme.liquid file and once again save. Now, your store will load up and the Tidio will download its assets only after the user starts interacting with the page. See the video tutorial here.

And that’s it. By doing this you’ve ensured your customers will get their answers in time hopefully increasing your conversion rates.

Follow this link to get started with Tidio absolutely free, plus enjoy a generous 20% discount whenever you decide to upgrade.

If you are interested in learning more about implementing a chatboot to your Shopify store you can watch this video.