Is Your eCommerce Site Ready for AI Chatbots?
Imagine this - you log in to your favorite clothing retailer website to revamp your summer wardrobe. Upon logging in, you're prompted with an instant message window - it's a chatbot that introduces itself as your personal shopper. You answer a few questions about what you're looking for, what styles you're interested in, and how much you're looking to spend. After a few moments, the chatbot responds with a list of 3 unique outfits that you love. You can hit "Order" right from the chatbot window and are provided an order number.
Is this hypothetical a bit "fantastical"? Sure. Is it the path that AI in eCommerce is heading? Seemingly so. The rise of AI technologies are continuing to engrain itself in many industries & venues. It seems naive to think that the scenario I laid out above won't be available in the near future. I'm not alone in this thinking; in Gartners Hype Cycle for Digital Commerce, 2024, the category "Conversational AI for Digital Commerce" is working towards the end of what they label the "Trough of Disillusionment" phase and about to enter the "Slope of Enlightenment" phase.
Given this Gartner article is from the summer of 2024, it doesn't seem unreasonable that we've already entered this enlightenment phase. The recently released Gartner Hype Cycle for Digital Commerce, 2025, doesn't have the same category for "Conversational AI for Digital Commerce" but does have "AI Agents for Commerce Operations" in the Innovation Trigger phase.
Conversational AI chatbots can leverage AI agents in the background through these initial touchpoints with the customer via these AI chatbots. Although these AI agents aren't limited to these customer-initiated tasks / operations, I think this updated chart shows that the industry is on a path of AI implementation through various avenues & implementations.
Appropriately implementing conversational AI into your eCommerce implementation requires careful introspection on your industry, customers, and existing eCommerce capabilities. Without this introspection, your AI chatbot will likely fall short of expectations.
Use Cases for an AI Chatbot
As conversational AI becomes commonplace within the eCommerce space, it's worth taking a deeper look at the various use cases that an AI Chatbot could enhance or redefine your company's eCommerce experience. Here are a few examples to paint a clearer picture:
Personal Shopper Agent - Acts as a consultative shopping assistant that understands style preferences, budget constraints, and occasion requirements to curate personalized product recommendations and complete outfits.
Customer Service Representative - Handles order inquiries, returns, shipping questions, and basic troubleshooting while maintaining conversation context and escalating complex issues to human agents when needed.
Inventory & Availability Assistant - Provides real-time stock information, estimated restock dates, and suggests alternative products when items are unavailable, managing the entire availability communication process.
Post-Purchase Concierge - Manages order tracking, delivery notifications, and post-purchase support while proactively reaching out about delays, collecting feedback, and facilitating returns or exchanges.
Sales Qualification Agent - Engages potential customers to understand their needs, budget, and timeline, qualifying leads for sales teams while providing immediate assistance outside business hours.
Technical Product Advisor - Provides detailed product specifications, compatibility information, and technical guidance, particularly valuable for complex products requiring specialized knowledge.
Loyalty Program Manager - Explains rewards programs, tracks points, suggests redemption options, and promotes exclusive offers while identifying at-risk customers for retention efforts.
There are certain operations that couldn't conceivably be accomplished previously by ramping up your workforce—it isn't practical—but now it is through AI agents that can scale infinitely while maintaining consistent service quality.
Current eCommerce Implementations
Amazon has already rolled out an AI Chatbot called "Rufus", which acts as a personal shopper that can aid in a variety of manners. For example, I asked it to find me a running water bottle under $30. After providing additional filtering options, such as filtering by only those that have straps, it provided a list of options that seemed promising:
The chat was still present after visiting the PDP, providing a few example prompts to further provide more product information without having to scroll down the page.
When asking for specific review information, it can also summarize some of the downsides of the product:
I recommend watching this live stream from OpenAI, where members of the team walk through their latest update on the Responses API. They demo the implementation within various eCommerce scenarios, deploying the AI Chatbot in both a "personal shopper" manner as well as a "customer service" representative.
The concept of deploying an AI Chatbot with various "agents" is extremely powerful. This means that not only can your chatbot serve different functions, but when developing one, you can tailor the AI Chatbot in a way that makes most sense for your business. The summer wardrobe I discussed at the start of this post highlights a "personal shopper" agent in a way that could be pretty useful. Consider a B2B eCommerce site who sells complex machinery to various companies. In this case, having a sophisticated product research AI chatbot would be more apt, allowing users to find and/or build custom configured products to spec without the back-and-forth with their sales rep and product engineers.
Reinventing the Chatbot
Back in 2019, one of Avatria's founders, Brian Ballard, wrote an article about the rise of chatbots and the importance of incorporating the chatbot logs into a company's analytics & development cycles. What are people commonly asking the chatbot? What features are missing from your site that people keep asking for? Are there simple UX fixes that would alleviate customer friction on the site that is seen in these logs?
The focus of this blogpost was about customers leveraging chatbots to alleviate issues with a given site. That is, a substitute for calling a customer service phone number. The examples we gave above with Amazon Rufus and the OpenAI demo do show the "customer service" AI Chatbot agent. However, one thing that wasn't present in 2019 was the culture in turning towards AI Chatbots for various agentic tasks.
As of the publication date of this post, ChatGPT is the 5th most visited site in the world, according to similarweb.com. People are turning towards AI Chatbots in their everyday lives - finding that whether they're writing a blogpost, coding a project, doing their homework, or coming up with a shopping list, AI chatbots are able to streamline their processes.
Because of this potential, it requires a closer look at whether or not your industry is a good use case for implementing a chatbot on your site.
AI Chatbot Effectiveness Evaluation
Is your industry one that could benefit from an AI Chatbot implementation? The questions to ask are plentiful, but there are two main "buckets" of questions, with some sub-questions under each of them:
What AI Chatbot agents are most useful for my industry?
What questions are my customer service agents currently fielding?
Would customers be comfortable having those questions handled by an AI Chatbot?
What value-added services can we provide for our customers what would have previously been unattainable with human intervention?
Is my company well positioned to implement this chatbot?
What kind of customer data does my site currently keep track of?
Do I have the development team or time to implement a chatbot?
Are we positioned from a budgetary position to take on a project like this?
These are just scratching the surface on the appropriate questions to ask before undertaking this approach, but they're important to consider. In future blogposts in this series, we'll dive deeper into these questions and which answers should sway you in the direction of implementation of an AI Chatbot for your company.
So What?
Given the rise of conversational AI Chatbots across various industries and everyday life, it seems natural to expect that customers will be leveraging these tools within the eCommerce space, as well. Being able to search for products on a website was initially a differentiator for early adopters before it became "table stakes" and a part of almost every modern eCommerce UI today.
It's likely that AI Chatbots are a next iteration of a site feature. Deploying an intelligent chatbot very likely will become something that customers "expect" when they are looking to shop online. It's worth considering options now to ensure that you're prepared when that inflection point is met.