Chatbot vs AI Shopping Assistant

Imagine you walk into a store – one has a friendly salesperson greeting you, offering personalised recommendations and deals. The other has a grumpy clerk who only answers your questions if you shout loud enough. That's the difference between an AI Shopping Assistant and a regular AI chatbot!

Chatbot (a.k.a. The Answer Machine)

• Great for basic tasks: answering FAQs, checking order status, and simple troubleshooting.
• Think of it as a helpful (but not very exciting) store clerk who just points you in the right direction.

AI Shopping Assistant (a.k.a. The Personal Shopper)

• Great for extraordinary tasks: recommending perfect products, guiding you through the shopping experience, and even throwing in special offers.
• Think of it as a friendly salesperson who anticipates your needs, suggests great finds, and keeps things fun with trivia and quizzes.

Now that we have a basic understanding of the difference between a Chatbot and an AI Shopping assistant, let’s delve into how exactly the two are different and what you, as an eCommerce brand owner can expect when it comes to integrating an AI solution to your store.

If we speak about the very primary functions of both, a chatbot provides customer service & support automation to a certain extent. It can answer FAQs, order status inquiries, handle returns and refunds, basic troubleshooting which can help you with cost savings from reduced need for human support agents, and improved customer satisfaction through faster response times.

With an AI Shopping Assistant, the primary function is delivering an end-to-end shopping experience to every visitor that lands up on your eCommerce site.

AI Shopping Assistants for ecommerce can provide your visitors with personalised product recommendations, guided shopping, upselling and cross-selling, real-time promotions, and assisting with product discovery - and at the same time do everything that an AI chatbot has been doing. 

While you can save your agent cost and time, and improve overall customer experience and interaction with your brand, with AI shopping assistants what you also get is -

• highly personalised shopping experience
• increased conversion rates
• higher average order values 
• improved customer engagement, and retention

This eventually leads to more direct sales and higher customer lifetime value, and not to mention - a better customer relationship and brand loyalty.

AI Chatbots for ecommerce are usually reactive in nature, meaning, they engage only when prompted by the customer. They just wait round the bottom corner of your site to be opened by your visitors and ask something if they are facing any trouble. 

Unlike reactive chatbots, AI based Shopping Assistant proactively nudges the users to offer recommendations, discounts, general trivia, quizzes to make it interactive and personalised - just like how a real time customer representative at a physical store would have engaged its customers. 

Invest in the Future of Ecommerce

If you are an eCommerce brand, it makes a lot of sense to invest in an AI shopping Assistant if you're already using an AI chatbot or any other chatbot. It will not only take care of all the basic things that a chatbot does, but it will also help in improving your overall conversion rates, AOV and user engagement on your ecommerce website.

Introducing Manifest AI: Your End-to-End AI Shopping Assistant 

With Manifest AI, we have one simple mission: to make AI the central entity in guiding the consumer journey on your eCommerce store. We believe in creating an AI experience that's proactive, engaging, and indispensable to your customers.


Unlike basic chatbots, Manifest AI empowers your brand to give:

• Instantaneous + Personalized Customer Support
• Personalised recommendations at the right time
• 9+ different kinds of nudges to improve AoV, conversion rates & user engagement
• AI-Driven discount pop-ups to incentivize purchases
• AI-based product quizzes for shopify brands based on user’s intent and journey 
• Smart recovery of abandoned carts
• Seamless upsells and cross-sells by recommending complementing products at the right time
• Seamless human handover whenever needed
• Multilingual capabilities supporting 100+ languages
• Lead collection and integration with marketing tools
• Capability to fine-tune our LLM to support your business needs
• Integration with all major CRM and support platforms like Gorgias, Zendesk etc.

The world has changed, and your brand needs to evolve with it. Just like a smartphone is essential in today's world, an AI Shopping Assistant is crucial for the success of your eCommerce store. 

Embrace the future of shopping with Manifest AI!