In this article, you'll find information about how the product catalog works on the Botmaker e-commerce platform.

Estimated reading time: 08 minutes

E-commerce and Product Catalog in Botmaker

The e-commerce functionality and product catalog encompass features that allow businesses to integrate products and shops within a chatbot. Once integrated, the chatbot can offer products to customers and manage a shopping experience independently.

E-commerce

The e-commerce function enables configuring the shopping experience. Thus, the company can decide whether to use a conversational shopping experience or a traditional e-commerce website.

Botmaker offers two types of experiences:

1. Conversational: Once a catalog is integrated, the chatbot can converse with a customer through an instant messaging channel and offer products based on the customer's interests. It can also provide delivery options, understand and address location-based queries, and handle payments.
2. Botmaker's E-commerce Portal: If a company prefers their customers to browse the entire catalog and have a more traditional experience, they can utilize Botmaker's pre-built e-commerce portal. This is a fully functional e-commerce site with a shopping cart where customers can search and add any number of products.

Once the conversation starts, the chatbot provides the customer with a link to the e-commerce site. The customer selects products, creates a cart, and returns to the conversation, where the chatbot guides them through the payment and checkout process.

The platform also offers the ability to immediately change the site's branding and can customize logos, colors, and more to match the company's brand identity.

Catalog

A catalog encompasses several concepts that enable a company to offer a conversational commerce experience. The main components of a catalog include:

• Products: Items identified by a SKU that can be sold directly to the customer.
• Categories (optional): Grouping criteria for classifying items. Categories help organize products and aid in searching and presentation.
• Stores (optional): To separate the product catalog by store or add geolocation capabilities. Stores allow defining a set of stores and can include information such as address and coordinates. They are particularly useful when presenting different shipping options to the user or if each store maintains its own inventory or pricing scheme.
• Service Areas (optional): Specifies geographical zones where the company can serve its customers. A store can be associated with a service area, defining the scope of that specific store. This can be used to match a customer's actual location with a store's service area. If within the customer's area, the store and its products will be shown.
• Price Schemes (optional): While a product has a default value, price schemes are used to control prices based on service areas. Thus, a store can be associated with many service areas, each defining different prices for the same product. This provides great flexibility in price management within a region.

Can data be imported from the Botmaker catalog?

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

• Catalog API: A programmatic way to incorporate data into a catalog, useful for companies with large product catalogs that are constantly updated.
• Spreadsheet: Products can be imported into the catalog via XLSX files. This method also allows for uploading stores, prices, categories, and service areas.
• E-commerce: We offer catalog import services with Shopify, Magento, and Vtex.

Conversational Commerce

Bots can now offer customers different ways to search for and purchase products. Whether a company prefers a more traditional approach, such as displaying a complete e-commerce site, or offering products through natural language conversation, new actions and intentions can be defined to present different experiences to the customer.

E-commerce Portal

This functionality consists of a complete e-commerce site that allows users to search and navigate products, add items to the cart, and proceed to checkout.

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

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

• Automatic Categories
• Product Search
• Shopping Cart
• Product Notes
• Selling Prices
• Completion of the purchasing process

The purchasing process is also connected to Botmaker, and after 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 automatically take actions such as generating a payment link. If the payment process needs to be handled manually, cart messages are also available to the agent.

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

Product List Messages (PLM) and WhatsApp Shopping Cart

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

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

When the customer clicks on "view products," a list of products with detailed descriptions is displayed on their mobile device natively, without needing to switch to a desktop view. Here, customers can select and view products, and add them to the cart.

Finally, customers can initiate the payment process for their purchase. Similar to the e-commerce portal, payment links are sent in a message within the conversation, triggering intentions in Botmaker, such as assigning a human agent to finalize the purchase or establishing an automatic payment flow using the chatbot.

E-commerce Portal, WhatsApp Product List Messages, and Botmaker AI

All the functionalities mentioned above 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 flexibility to:

• Search nearby stores based on customer address or location message.
• Select a store and offer products filtered 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 WebChat and WhatsApp channels:

1. WebChat

1. WhatsApp

Have a dynamic and integrated conversational commerce experience in the same channel with Botmaker!

Remember to visit our Help Center for more information.

Written By: Botmaker Team

Updated: 07/07/2024