Custom Shopify App – Chat Bot Powered Price Negotiator

Shopify is an ever-evolving CMS in the E-commerce ecosystem with more than 275,000 merchants. It’s primary USP in the E-commerce ecosystem is an easy to operate and feature rich admin panel which is helpful for easily setting up an E-commerce store and effectively monitoring key store metrics to enhance conversion rates.

However, an easy to use CMS doesn’t guarantee sales. E-commerce ventures always get subjected to a lot of competition. Even after crossing the initial inflection point, E-commerce stores must consistently look to reduce shopping cart abandonment and increasing visitor to customer conversion for survival.

The Problem: E-commerce Discount Conundrum

Being one of the top-rated Shopify development services providers over the past 7 years, we have had the chance to work with many E-commerce entrepreneurs. Our experience made us believe that discount offerings are one of the most efficient methods of abandoned cart recovery and increasing conversion rates. Primarily, because the way E-commerce ecosystem is consistently training consumers to expect discounts all the time.

Don’t believe us? Why not check your own Email and SMS inbox. We bet that you will find at least 2 to 3 promotional emails or SMS from different vendors that you earlier used or subscribed to in the past.

However, providing discounts consistently might not be workable for businesses. Also, trying to recover abandoned carts through targeted discount emails might not be that effective. Customers might already buy a product from a competitor website rather than waiting for a discount email from you. Not to forget, cart abandonment emails also expose your discount strategy, making you more predictable.

However, there is a middle ground that hits just the right note for merchants as well as customers. Being development partners of the proposed solution for this discount conundrum, we are sharing our experience of developing the most effective way for carrying out price negotiations on Shopify Ecommerce stores.

The Solution: Automatic Price Negotiator

Before we actually dive into how the solution will work, let’s have a quick preview of what the user experience looks like.

Note: While there can be many use cases, we have considered the most commonly encountered scenario.

A customer visits a Shopify store and on the pricing page notices the product price. At this moment, the customer feels the product cost is too high and makes a decision to leave the website.

Acting upon the exit intent of the customer, the website displays a pop up that requests them to submit a counteroffer at which they want to buy the product.

With an open-ended option to enter a price at which customer wants to make the purchase, merchants notice an 80% chance that the visitor will be interested to make a counteroffer.

Once a customer submits his offer, the offer is analyzed by the store admin and he can accept it, or request the customer to increase the offer in case it is too low.

As this negotiation may happen back and forth, the store admin can propose a final offer himself at any stage if he feels that the customer is nowhere close to the least price after repeated attempts.

At this moment, the customer has to accept or decline the deal to break the loop.

That’s pretty much it. A minimal process that allows you to interact with your store visitors by recognizing their exit intent and offering them an option to negotiate a price at which the product can be sold.

Effective, isn’t it?

But Wait!! There’s More

• What if we tell you that the site owner was not even online when the negotiation took place.

• What if we tell you that the entire conversation with the customer was being handled by a chatbot.

This is what the Automatic Price Negotiator is all about.

It is a plug and play Shopify app that comes with a robust backend system allowing merchants to easily setup products for which they want to negotiate with the customers “through a chatbot”.

The real magic lies in the back end. This is where you can define different conditions for each product and setup replies that your chatbot will use based on the counter offers made by the customers.

The merchants can define a minimal price to be accepted for a product.

And can also define different conditions and messages for each scenario.

With such flexibility available right within the Shopify store admin panel, store owners have an option to effectually setup personalized chatbot that provides negotiations in a unique manner for each product – depending upon the defined conditions.

Hence, merchants don’t experience in the hassle of interacting with each and every customer to negotiate discounts, while customers can get the best discounts based on their own offers.

The Technology Behind The Scenes

The development was done in LAMP stack and utilized the following key components:

1. 1. YII Framework
   To develop the whole structure of the application along with application logic in MVC(Modal, View, Controller) format. This coding structure allowed developers to separate input, processing, and output of an application.This enabled faster and effective development, un-formatted data that can be used with any interface, and extensible code for future enhancements.
2. 2. Shopify API
   To establish the communication between the YII based application functions with Shopify CMS functions.
3. 3. Shopify Plus Account
   To obtain the license from Shopify for developing a custom Shopify App.
4. 4. A Reliable Hosting
   To host the source code of the app (Standard Shopify Pre-requisites.)

   Conclusion

   E-commerce success largely depends upon a merchant’s ability to think out of the box and come up with unique solutions to outclass the competition. Thankfully, a lot of app developers are already publishing innovative and unique solutions on the Shopify marketplace and we feel honored to have worked on a path-breaking solution that has helped numerous merchants in reducing shopping cart abandonment.

   Does your store have a specific requirement that only a custom app can fulfill or do you have an innovative idea that you think needs to be launched as a Shopify app? Then consult us to get free consultation for your requirements from our experienced analysts today.