Top 10 Best Live Chat Apps For Shopify Sellers

Introduction

Real-time and engaging interactions with customers can up the game for your ecommerce business and give you an edge over your competitors. A Live Chat app for your Shopify Store provides the required add-on features to enable live interactions with customers.

This lets you convert more visitors into customers and makes post-purchase interaction easier through live chat service. Further, this helps you build better trust with your customers by being easily reachable. This makes it on our list of the absolute must-have Shopify apps for your online store!

With the wide range of options available in the market for Shopify live chat apps, finding the right one for your Shopify store can be tricky. We have identified the best Shopify live chat apps and highlighted their pros and cons to help you choose the best one.

Top 10 Live Chat Apps for Shopify

1. Tidio Live Chat

Tidio is a pure chat app that allows you to connect with your customers and efficiently solve their queries. Tidio provides the necessary add-on features to enable your employees to communicate directly with customers when necessary.

A unified dashboard is provided to monitor live chats and emails from one place. Moreover, you can create a customized live chat widget on your Shopify store to encourage your customers to initiate real-time chats. 

Pros:

• They have integrations with various businesses management software generally used in the ecommerce industry.
• You can automate answers to frequently asked questions.

Cons:

• They only provide some general features and may not meet your specific requirements around the ticketing system.
• You cannot manage customer conversations on popular platforms like WhatsApp, Twitter, and Instagram from the platform.

2. DelightChat – Customer Service App for Shopify

  

DelightChat is a customer support software built for small and medium ecommerce businesses. They provide live chat-related add-on features to streamline the resolution of customer queries.

Integrations with popular social media platforms are also available, enabling you to revolve queries from multiple channels. They also allow you to collaborate with your team members from the same platform.

Pros:

• DelightChat is significantly cheaper than their competitors and offers good value for money.
• DelightChat has automation and self-serve features to resolve common queries automatically.

Cons:

• DelightChat is a relatively recent arrival in the market and does not have a significant number of customer reviews.
• They have a conversation-based pricing model that may not be preferable over the per-user pricing model.

3. Tawk.to Live Chat

Tawk.to is a live chat app that lets you monitor visitors to your website and talk to them. Voice and video call add-ons are available to make conversations more engaging. They provide the provision to respond to support tickets and assign support tickets to members of your team.

Pros:

• They allow you to create knowledge bases for both your employees and customers.
• They provide all the basic features for free, only charging for specific add-on services.

Cons:

• Tawk.to is not built for ecommerce and does not focus on ecommerce specific features.
• Their interface lacks polish and is often cumbersome.
• While the basic features are free, additional features are limited and must be bought separately.

4. Facebook Messenger Marketing

Facebook Messenger Marketing is a live chat platform for Shopify merchants that uses Facebook Messenger to connect to customers. They have a hassle-free installation process and can send targeted messages to your customers.

Pros:

• Customers can easily subscribe to your store updates and promotions via one-click subscriptions.
• They provide some upselling features by tracking customer behavior.

Cons:

• Some of their customers faced issues regarding the stability of their app.
• Facebook Messenger Marketing lacks a proactive tech support team.
• They provide very few integrations with other software popular in the ecommerce sector.

5. Facebook Chat Box – Marketing

Facebook Chat Box is another platform that uses the Facebook messaging services to connect Shopify merchants with customers. They allow customers to send messages to your Facebook page, and enables you to chat with them.

Pros:

• It also works as an upselling app to encourage customers to send messages to you.
• Facebook Chat Box tries to gain customer subscriptions by offering discount codes via pop-ups.

Cons:

• Reliability of their pop-up feature is questionable.
• User reviews suggest that their website and app suffer from frequent downtimes.
• FaceBook Chat Box does not offer much customization.

6. JivoChat Live Chat

JivoChat is a live chat app that allows you to talk to customers via live chat, phone, email, and social media. They aim to increase your support team’s efficiency by promoting collaboration. Moreover, they enable you to see who is visiting your page, the domains they are visiting from, and the pages they are viewing in your store.

Pros:

• They allow customers to rate your chat service and provide analytics reports to identify problem areas in your customer support.
• JivoChat allows you to see messages as they are being typed, significantly decreasing your response times.
• They allow you to invite colleagues to participate in chats with customers.

Cons:

• Most of their features are restricted to their paid plan.
• The per agent pricing model of JivoChat often works out to be expensive for large support teams.
• Customer reviews indicate that their support team is not up to the mark.

7. Formilla Live Chat

Formilla Live Chat offers live chat services on a freemium model where you have to pay only for certain additional features. Configurable chatbots are also available. They enable you to see your website traffic in real-time along with the geographical distribution of the visitors.

Pros:

• They provide various stats about your visitors, including pages visited and the time spent on each page.
• Formilla Live Chat allows you to create chatbots to handle common requests.

Cons:

• Though the base plan is reasonably priced, most of the necessary features require you to subscribe to a higher plan.
• They do not have powerful automation features.
• Very few integrations are available with commonly used software.

8. Gorgias Live Chat and Helpdesk 

Gorgias Live Chat and Helpdesk is a customer service add-on available for ecommerce stores like Shopify, BigCommerce, and WooCommerce. They have deep integration with Shopify allowing you to pull customer data directly into their dashboard. They also feature integrations with social media platforms for live chat.

Pros:

• You can use custom tags for conversations and use them to find specific conversations for future reference.
• Gorgias lets you create highly customized macros to automate replies to common queries.
• It can integrate easily with all leading social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Cons:

• Their platform presents a steep learning curve to using the advanced features effectively.
• Gorgias is extremely expensive compared to the competition. Even with their most expensive plan at $750/month, they have a cap of 5000 tickets.
• Collaborating with your team is a cumbersome process on Gorgias.
• They focus more on their tracking features than the conversation tools.

9. Zendesk live chat app

Zendesk’s live chat software offers Shopify-powered customer service to online shoppers while also saving time and boosting efficiency on the sales floor with automations. This live chat app provides centralized control to manage customer interactions and data in one place.

Zendesk live chat app makes sure you don’t lose your customers by triggering alerts to service agents whenever they are about to leave the chat room or abandon cart.

This live chat app provides key features like native and third-party chatbot integrations, performance metrics, chat queue management, and a pre-built analytics dashboard.

Pros:

• Zendesk provides all the key features of a standard live chat app for Shopify.
• Zendesk Dashboard can be customized to manage chats and customer data efficiently.

Cons:

• This app does not offer a user-friendly interface for a simple workflow. A bit of training is required to get used to this live chat app.
• Installation can be a bit of a hassle with glitches popping up regularly.
• Zendesk live chat app can be a little expensive for shopify business owners.

10.  Pure chat live chat app

Pure Chat is another great app for Shopify owners who want to offer their customers one-on-one interactions.

This app offers two plans: The Growth plan gives users 10 agents total with unlimited websites allowed on the account while still maintaining an affordable price point; however, if these limitations don’t suit what your needs may be then there’s always Pro which offers more features including 1000 SMS messages per month.

Pros:

• Pure chat app offers unlimited chats with customization for the chat widget.
• This app is also user-friendly with an easy integration process.
• Offers comprehensive features for a free subscription.

Cons:

• There can be a lot of technical issues in the integration process with Pure Chat Live app.

How to Select the Best Shopify Live Chat App?

Proactive customer interaction has become an integral part of ecommerce businesses today. As customer interaction plays a vital role in acquiring and retaining customers, choosing the right customer support add-on for your business is important. Some points to keep in mind while looking for the same are:-

1. Software Cost

The upfront cost of the software and the additional costs involved should be an important consideration for you. Do note that most of the Shopify live chat apps follow a freemium model of pricing, where some basic features are free and the rest cost extra.

 

2. Any Cap On The Number Of Support Tickets Processed

Some of the options explored above limit the number of support tickets you can process per month. The exact number varies depending on the plan chosen. This can be a bottleneck for large enterprises that handle a large number of support requests.

3. Collaboration Features For Your Team And Provision To Transfer Support Calls 

Some of the Shopify live chat apps lets you communicate and collaborate with your team from their platform. Further, the ability to transfer support calls to the appropriate person in your team can increase customer engagement significantly.

4. Availability Of Automated Workflows And Resolution Features

Automated responses and workflows can resolve the common queries automatically, significantly decreasing the volumes your support team has to handle. Additionally, this ensures that only important queries that need manual intervention are forwarded to your support team.

5. Customer Support

Proper support provided to you by the Shopify live chat app can resolve your technical issues and rectify glitches faster. This significantly reduces the downtime your business faces.

6. Reliability And Potential Downtime Of The Software

Overall reliability and stability of the platform are also essential to consider as your Shopify store being offline means potential loss of revenue.

7. Branding customisation

Customers are always inclined to appreciate well-placed customer support widgets that blend neatly on the e-commerce business website. Select the Shopify live chat app that provides customization to incorporate your brand seamlessly with the live chat app to offer hassle-free customer support.

8. Tracking Customer Engagement

Some of the best Shopify live chat apps offer analytics and tracking to monitor all your customer engagement. This helps you understand your business operations better and manage customer service more efficiently.

9. Multi Language Support

If your business handles a diverse consumer base it would be ideal to look for multi-language support.  So, take advantage of Shopify live chat apps that provide customer support with a substantial number of languages. 

10. Security

Security for all the customer engagement on your e-commerce business platform is a must. Top Shopify live chat apps are highly encrypted to offer safe customer service.

Overall recommendation

By now, you have a pretty good idea of the options available in the market and their features. As most of the necessary features come under the paid plans, choosing the best live chat app for Shopify is essentially a case of carrying out a proper cost-benefit analysis.

For small enterprises, it may be a good idea to start with a free plan of some of the popular live chat solutions for Shopify like Tidio. If your business primarily depends on social media for promotion, live chat apps like Facebook Messenger Marketing and Facebook Chat Box might be the way to go for increased customer satisfaction. They have the added advantage of being easier to use and are integrated with platforms you are already comfortable with.

If you own a medium or large ecommerce business, feel free to splurge on some of the more expensive and live chat feature-rich options like Gorgias and JivoChat! 

The money you spend here will often find its way back to you through the better upselling potential and customer engagement provided. Finally, Gorgias can be a viable choice if you manage your online store on multiple other platforms apart from Shopify, like Google Shopping apps and more!