AI chatbot vs live chat: which does your store need?

The short answer

• If most of your questions have answers that are already written down (shipping, returns, sizes, order status), an AI chatbot answers them at any hour, without staff.
• If your sales depend on conversation (custom quotes, consultative selling, complex fitting), or you have a team that is online anyway, live chat with people is worth paying for.
• Most small stores do best with an AI assistant in front and a quick route to a person behind it.

How each works

Live chat is a chat window on your site connected to an inbox where people on your team answer. It works when someone is there. Outside those hours it usually becomes a contact form. Live chat software tends to come with things a support team needs: several agents, assignment, saved replies, history per customer, reports.

An AI chatbot (or AI assistant) answers by itself, from a source of information you give it, such as your website, product catalogue and policies. Modern ones understand questions written any way, in many languages, and write their own replies rather than picking from a menu. The good ones hand the conversation to a person when they are not sure or when the shopper asks for one.

Side by side

What each costs

The pricing models are different enough that a direct comparison of list prices is misleading. Work it out from your own volume.

Live chat: seats plus time

Live chat software is usually priced per agent seat per month, sometimes with a limit on conversations. The software is the small part of the cost; the larger part is the people answering. If you want chat covered twelve hours a day, that is a rota, whoever is on it. For a one- or two-person store, live chat in practice means answering from your phone between other work.

AI chatbots: per conversation, message or resolution

AI products charge by usage, and the unit matters:

• Per conversation: one visitor chatting, however many questions they ask. Predictable.
• Per message: every reply counts. A long conversation costs more than a short one.
• Per resolution or outcome: you pay when the AI is judged to have resolved the question. Read the definition carefully, and check what is charged on top of the platform's own seats.
• Overage: what happens past your plan. Some products bill extra per unit; others stop answering.

Ours is priced per conversation with no overage: free for 30 conversations a month, then $19 for 90, $59 for 275, $199 for 1,000 and $1,099 for 6,000. Past the limit, new visitors are asked to e-mail you until the count restarts on the 1st. For other products' current prices, see our comparisons with Tidio, Intercom and Gorgias, each with sources.

When you need a person

An AI assistant should not be the only line for these. Make sure they reach someone:

• refunds, charges and anything involving money;
• damaged, missing or wrong items;
• complaints, and anyone who sounds upset;
• custom orders, quotes and negotiation;
• anything your policies don't cover, where someone has to decide.

If these are a large share of your conversations, or the person answering is part of what you sell, you want people on chat. If they are a small share, an assistant that hands them over quickly is enough.

Combining the two

The common setup for small teams is an assistant first, people second:

1. The assistant answers what your pages answer, at any hour.
2. When it isn't sure, or the shopper asks for a person, it says so and passes the conversation on with the history.
3. Someone picks it up: live in the chat if they are around, or by e-mail later.
4. Questions it couldn't answer are listed, so you can add the answers to your site and hand over less next time.

There are two ways to build that. Full support platforms put the AI agent and a shared inbox for your team in one product, with seats, assignment and reports. That suits a support team. The lighter way, which is what we make, is an assistant that hands over to tools you already use. Our assistant passes conversations to you by e-mail, Slack, Discord or Telegram, and from the chat apps you can answer the shopper live in their chat window.

To be clear about what we don't do: we have no shared inbox, no agent seats, no ticketing, no phone and no WhatsApp. If your team needs those, a helpdesk such as Gorgias or Intercom is the better fit.

Mistakes to avoid with either

• A chat button nobody answers. Live chat that shows "online" while nobody is there teaches visitors that your chat doesn't work. Show your hours, or let an assistant cover the gaps.
• A bot with no way out. If the visitor cannot reach a person, or has to type "agent" five times, the bot has made support worse. Make the hand-off easy to find and quick.
• A bot that guesses. A wrong answer about a refund or a delivery date creates more work than no answer. See how to get an AI chatbot that doesn't make things up.
• Hiding that it is AI. Label the assistant as AI. Visitors forgive a bot that says "I don't know"; they don't forgive one that pretended to be a person.
• Buying seats for a volume you don't have. A five-seat plan for a store that gets ten chats a day mostly pays for empty chairs.

A quick way to decide

• Count last month's support messages by type (see how to reduce support e-mails).
• If most are answered by information you already have written down, start with an AI assistant and a hand-off route.
• If most need judgement, start with live chat, or improve the pages first.
• Try before paying: test with real questions from your inbox, including ones your site can't answer, and see what each option does with them.

Questions