Blog / E-commerce

WhatsApp chatbot for e-commerce: examples and how to start

A WhatsApp chatbot for e-commerce is today one of the most effective tools for selling more without growing your support team. The customer writes where they're already used to chatting, gets instant answers on sizes, shipping and availability, and is guided to the purchase step by step. In this guide we look at what a chatbot can really do for your store, with concrete examples, and how to start without writing a line of code.

What a chatbot can do for your store

The basic functions cover most of the repetitive work that today steals time from your team. A good chatbot answers the most frequent questions, shows products, checks the status of an order and recovers those who abandoned their cart. All automatically, at any hour, even when the store is closed.

• Answering FAQs: shipping times, returns, payment methods, sizes.
• Recommending products based on what the customer is looking for.
• Communicating the order status and shipping details.
• Recovering abandoned carts with a message at the right time.
• Collecting the contact and passing the chat to an operator when needed.

Menu chatbot vs AI agent

Not all chatbots are the same. The classic one works with menus: "type 1 for shipping, 2 for returns". It's predictable but rigid, and it frustrates the customer as soon as they step off the expected track. An AI agent, instead, understands natural language: if the customer writes "is the blue hoodie I saw still available in M?", it answers on the merits instead of sending them back to a menu. For a modern e-commerce the AI agent is almost always the better choice, because the conversation feels like one with a good sales assistant.

Example: a customer's journey

Imagine a customer writing in the evening. The chatbot greets them, understands they're looking for a gift, suggests two or three products in the indicated price range, answers the question about delivery times before Christmas and, when the customer has decided, sends the link to complete the purchase. If at some point the request gets complicated, the conversation passes to a human operator who picks up exactly where the bot left off, without making the customer repeat anything.

Start by training the bot only on the 10 questions you receive most often. They almost always cover 80% of conversations and give you a visible result in a few days.

Cart recovery: the feature that pays for itself

Many customers put products in the cart and then disappear. A chatbot connected to your flow can send a gentle reminder a few hours later, maybe with a question ("did you have a doubt about the size?") instead of an immediate discount. Often just reminding them of the purchase is enough to bring the customer back. It's one of the automations that generates the fastest return on an e-commerce.

Mistakes to avoid

• Pretending the bot is human: better to be transparent and offer the handover to an operator right away.
• Training it with vague or outdated information: prices and availability must be up to date.
• Not providing handover: a bot with no way out to a human frustrates customers in difficult cases.
• Sending messages to those who haven't given consent: opt-in is always required to comply with the rules and GDPR.

How to do it with SendApp

With SendApp Agent you create a trainable AI agent with your store's information: catalog, return policies, shipping times, FAQs. It answers 24/7 on WhatsApp, recommends products and passes the conversation to a human operator with handover when the situation requires it. You connect WhatsApp via the official Meta API (with approved templates and the green tick) or via WhatsApp Web with a QR code, and manage everything from the inbox together with the other channels. Broadcast campaigns with templates and {name} variables complete the picture for promotions and cart recovery.

How much it costs

SendApp starts at 19 euros a month and includes the AI agent, the CRM and the multichannel inbox. With the official Meta API, Cloud API messages are billed by Meta according to its rates, with no SendApp markup; via WhatsApp Web with QR you have no per-message cost. For an e-commerce, the time saved on support and the recovered carts usually cover the cost of the subscription with plenty of margin.