Independent websites have become an increasingly popular choice for cross-border e-commerce, offering businesses full control over website design, functionality, and customer data. However, one challenge many businesses face is effectively communicating with customers in real time. Without a chat plugin, response times are slow, customer inquiries go unanswered, and potential sales are lost.
By integrating a live chat plugin, businesses can enhance customer service by enabling instant automated responses and seamless human follow-ups. This not only improves response speed but also significantly reduces cart abandonment rates. In this guide, we’ll explore the benefits, use cases, installation steps, and optimization techniques for adding a chat plugin to your independent website, helping you engage customers more effectively and boost conversions.
Why does an independent website need a chat plugin?
Effective customer communication is a key challenge for independent website operators. Without a chat plugin, potential customers may struggle to find a way to reach out, leading to lost sales opportunities because of low-quality customer service. A live chat plugin addresses this issue by providing a direct and efficient communication channel.
1. Improve customer communication efficiency
Through the chat plug-in, users can communicate with customer service in real time directly through the chat window. The timeliness of the chat plug-in can shorten the response time and improve customer satisfaction.
2. Improve conversion rate
Instant responses help resolve customer concerns quickly, reducing hesitation and increasing the likelihood of purchase completion. Automated bots can handle common inquiries, while human support can take over complex cases.
3. Improve the SEO ranking of independent sites
In the operation of independent websites, SEO ranking directly affects the natural exposure of independent websites in Google searches. One of the important criteria for Google to evaluate the SEO ranking of independent websites is the time users stay on the website. After adding a chat plug-in to the independent website, enterprises can use AI chatbots to attract users to interact more on the independent website, increase their stay time on the website, and thus improve the SEO performance.
4. Support diverse social media platform engagement
Many customers prefer using social media for communication. Chat plugins can integrate with platforms like WhatsApp, Messenger, and Line, allowing businesses to redirect conversations and build stronger customer relationships.
5. Multi-language support
Cross-border e-commerce independent sites often have users from all over the world, so multi-language support is essential. Chat plug-ins can automatically identify and translate messages sent by customers and translate reply messages into the language used by customers, eliminating language barriers and reducing corporate employment costs.
Key Use Cases for a Live Chat Plugin
In actual usage scenarios of users and enterprises, when will users and enterprises use chat plug-ins? Here are some specific usage scenarios:
Pre-sales support: Solve user questions in real time
When customers browse cross-border e-commerce independent websites, they may not be able to fully understand the product features, prices or event information through the content on the page. When they want to learn more about the product, the chat plug-in provides them with a direct communication channel, allowing customers to learn about the company's products without adding friends, reducing the intermediate steps for users to understand the company's products, accelerating users' decision-making speed, and reducing customer churn.
After-sales support: improving user satisfaction
After purchasing a product, users may want to know the logistics situation, or need certain after-sales support (return or exchange or product usage issues). At this time, customers can quickly contact after-sales customer service through the chat plug-in to solve the problem, without having to wait for after-sales service through cumbersome contact methods such as email.
Promotions & events: boosting engagement
During Black Friday or other big promotions, a large number of customers visit the company's independent website, hoping to buy some discounted products, but they don't know what discounts or promotional products the company has. At this time, you can use the chat plug-in's preset automatic reply, or display discounts in the chat plug-in's bulletin board to guide users to specific event pages, clearly convey discount information, and encourage users to place orders.
Steps to install the chat plugin on an independent site
The steps to install the chat plugin vary depending on the independent website building platform used by the enterprise. The following takes Shopify as an example to demonstrate the tutorial for installing the chat plugin on an independent website. If the enterprise builds its own independent website on other website building platforms such as ShopLazza, ShopLine, WordPress, BigCommerce, OpenCart, UEESHOP, Shopyy, etc., you can view the tutorial for installing the chat plugin at this link: How to add a chat plugin to an independent website? -SaleSmartly-Help Center-SaleSmartly User Guide.
1. Install via Shopify app
(1) Log in to Shopify, [Apps] - [Add App] - [Shopify App Store].
(2) Enter the search page and enter [SaleSmartly] - [Install].
(3) Enter the application authorization page and click [Install] again.
(4) Register a SaleSmartly account. After completing the SaleSmartly account registration, you can check the successful installation of the plug-in Shopify store site in the SaleSmartly backend [Settings] - [Chat plug-in].
2. Install via JavaScript code
(1) Create a plugin in SaleSmartly
①Register and log in to SaleSmartly - [Integration] - [Chat Plugin] - [Create Plugin] - [Plugin Configuration] to edit the desired style of the enterprise chat plugin.
②After the plugin is created, return to [Chat Plugin] — [Copy] Installation code.
(2) Install SaleSmartly on Shopify store
① After logging in to Shopify, go to [Online Store] — [Template], click [Action] — [Edit Code] to enter the code editing page.
② On the code editing page, click [layout] — [theme.liquid] to enter the file code input box.
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