The ongoing advances in technology have brought about new trends intended to make shopping more convenient and easy. These trends have helped to transition traditional shopping methods to the online world where artificial intelligence (AI) applications have made the whole process fast and convenient.
One of the most popular AI programs for eCommerce is the shopping bot. With a shopping bot, you will find your preferred products, services, discounts, and other online deals at the click of a button. It’s a highly advanced robot designed to help you scan through hundreds, if not thousands, of shopping websites for the best products, services, and deals in a split second.
But what’s the process of developing bots? This article will teach you how to make a bot to buy things online.
What Is a Shopping Bot and Why Is It Important?
A shopping bot is a robotic self-service system that allows you to analyze as many web pages as possible for the available products and deals. This software is designed to support you with each inquiry and give you reliable feedback more rapidly than any human professional. It also makes product navigation easier and more convenient.
As an online vendor, you want your customers to go through the checkout process as effortlessly and swiftly as possible. Fortunately, a shopping bot significantly shortens the checkout process, allowing your customers to find the products they need with the click of a button. Many customers hate wasting their time going through long lists of irrelevant products in search of a specific product. A shopping bot makes their search easy and stress-free.
This software offers personalized recommendations designed to match the preferences of every customer. So, each shopper visiting your eCommerce site will get product recommendations that are based on their specific search. Thus, your customers won’t experience any friction in their shopping.
Important Steps in Making a Shopping Bot
Knowing what your customers want is important to keep them coming back to your website for more products. For instance, you need to provide them with a simple and quick checkout process and answer all their questions swiftly. To achieve this, you need to know how to make a checkout bot. Here are the main steps you need to follow when making your bot for shopping purposes.
Choose Your Shopping Bot’s Name
Your shopping bot needs a unique name that will make it easy to find. You should choose a name that is related to your brand so that your customers can feel confident when using it to shop.
Choose the Type of Shopping Bot
There are different types of shopping bots designed for different business purposes. So, the type of shopping bot you choose should be based on your business needs. Fortunately, modern bot developers can create multi-purpose bots that can handle shopping and checkout tasks.
Hire the Right Bot Developer
Look for a bot developer who has extensive experience in RPA (Robotic Process Automation). Make sure they have relevant certifications, especially regarding RPA and UiPath. Be sure and find someone who has a few years of experience in this area as the development stage is the most critical.
Launch Your Bot
This is the final step before you make your shopping bot available to your customers. The launching process involves testing your shopping and ensuring that it works properly. Make sure you test all the critical features of your shopping bot, as well as correcting bugs, if any. If everything is working fine, publish your bot.
Platforms for Building Shopping Bots
There are numerous platforms available, here are the most common platforms available for creating bots:
Facebook Messenger
If you are using Facebook Messenger to create your shopping bot, you need to have a Facebook page where the app will be added. So, if you don’t have an existing page, create one first. The app will be linked to the backend rest API interface to enable it to respond to customer requests. You should create a wizard-style interface for your bot based on your search categories and redirect it to an in-app browser for more operations, including order quantity, account creation, and add to cart.
Amazon Lex
This is a fairly new platform that allows you to set up rules based on your business operations. With these rules, the app can easily learn and respond to customer queries accordingly. Although this bot can partially replace your custom-built backend, it will be restricted to language processing, to begin with.
Several other platforms enable vendors to build and manage shopping bots across different platforms such as WeChat, Telegram, Slack, Messenger, among others. Therefore, your shopping bot should be able to work on different platforms. But you can start by using one platform for experimenting purposes.
Finally, while creating your own shopping bot is a challenging task that requires heavy UX, it’s a great way to serve your customer needs by minimizing obstacles to your products, deals, and general information. You can find the right developer here on Guru to create different bots, from shopping bots to Discord bots, that will fit your exact needs!
