What are Botmaker’s product catalog and e-commerce features?

In this article, you will get information regarding the product catalog on Botmaker’s e-commerce platform.

Estimated reading time: 08 minutes

E-commerce and product catalog on Botmaker

The e-commerce and product catalog features group together characteristics that allow companies to integrate products and stores into a chatbot. Once connected, the chatbot can offer products to customers and can manage a shopping experience on its own.

E-commerce

The e-commerce feature allows you to configure the shopping experience. Thus, the company can decide whether it wants to use the conversational shopping experience or a traditional e-commerce website.

Botmaker offers two types of experiences:

Conversational: Once a Catalog is integrated, the chatbot can have a conversation with a customer through an instant messaging channel and can offer products based on the customer’s interest. It can also offer delivery options, understand and resolve location-based queries and handle payments.
Botmaker e-commerce portal: If the company wants its customers to be able to search its entire catalog and have a more traditional experience, it can take advantage of Botmaker’s pre-built e-commerce portal. This is a fully functional e-commerce site with a shopping cart included, where the customer can search and add the desired products.

Once the conversation is initiated, the chatbot provides the customer with a link to the e-commerce site. The customer chooses the products, creates a cart, and returns to the conversation. The chatbot will guide them through the payment process and order placing.

The platform also offers the possibility to instantly rebrand the site and can customize logos, colors, and more to match the company’s brand identity.

Catalog

Catalog groups together several concepts, so that a company can offer a conversational commerce experience. The main components of a catalog are the following:

Products: Items identified by an SKU can be sold directly to the customer.
Categories (optional): Grouping criteria to classify items. Categories help organize products and also help during search and display.
Stores (optional): To separate the product catalog by store or add geolocation capabilities. They allow defining a set of stores and can include information related to address, coordinates, etc. They are especially useful when presenting the user with different shipping options or if each store maintains its inventory or pricing scheme.
Service Zones (optional): Refers to a way of specifying the geographic zones where the company can serve its customers. A store can be associated with a zone, thus defining the scope of that specific store. This can be used to compare the actual location of a customer with the service area of a store. This way, if it is within the customer’s area, that store and its products will be displayed.
Price schemes (optional): While a product has a default value, price schemes are used to control prices depending on the service area. Thus, a store can be associated with many service zones, and each one can define different prices for the same product. This provides great flexibility in managing prices in a region.

Is it possible to import data from the Botmaker catalog?

Yes. Currently, you can import Botmaker catalog data from the following sources:

API Catalog: This is a programmatic way to incorporate data into a catalog. It is very useful for companies with large product catalogs that are constantly updated.
Spreadsheet: Through XLSX files, a company can import products into the catalog. This method also allows loading stores, prices, categories, and service areas.

Conversational commerce

Bots can now offer customers different ways to search and buy products.

Whether a company prefers a more traditional approach, such as displaying a full e-commerce site or offering products through natural language conversation, new actions and intents can be defined to present different experiences to the customer.

E-commerce portal

This feature consists of a complete e-commerce site that allows the user to search and browse for products, add items to the cart and finally proceed to checkout.

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The customer journey begins with a conversation between the customer and the bot. At any point in the conversation, the bot can present a link to the site and the customer will be redirected there to begin the shopping experience.

The site is linked to the Botmaker Catalog and has the following tools:

Automatic categories
Product search
Shopping Cart
Product Notes
Selling prices
Completion of the checkout process

The checkout process is also connected to Botmaker and, after the purchase, a message with the shopping cart result is sent to the platform through the chat channel where the conversation originated.

These messages can be understood by the bot, which can execute an automatic action; for example, generating a payment link. In case the checkout process has to be handled manually, the cart messages will also be available to the agent.

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Note: The cart content is also available in a variable as a JSON string, which allows for more complex configurations such as creating a code action that sends the cart to a remote service.

Product List Messaging (PLM) and Shopping Cart via WhatsApp

Botmaker now allows sending a special component via WhatsApp to present a product list.

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These messages can be used to build different use cases, from simple experiences such as presenting discount catalogs, to more advanced conversational experiences.

Once the customer clicks on “view products,” they will see a list of products with detailed descriptions, which display natively on their mobile device without the need to switch to a desktop view. Here, customers can select and view products, and add them to the cart.

Finally, customers can initiate the checkout process for their purchase. Similar to the E-commerce portal, payment links are sent in a message in the conversation, which can trigger intents in Botmaker, such as assigning a human agent to finalize the purchase, or setting up an automatic payment flow using the chatbot.

E-commerce Portal, Product List Messaging via WhatsApp, and Botmaker Artificial Intelligence.

All the above features can be complemented with Botmaker’s predefined actions to create incredibly rich shopping experiences.

Botmaker now offers a variety of actions that give the chatbot the flexibility to perform the following:

Search for nearby stores based on the customer’s home address or location message.
Select a store and offer products by filtering by product availability in the store.
Allow customers to search for products in the catalog by offering category lists.
Search for products using natural language during a conversation.
Integrate with a variety of payment methods.

Check out the images below for the WebChat and WhatsApp channels: