The use of the messaging app Telegram is becoming more widespread. It has also extended its appeal in recent times, and people are using it for a broader range of activities. One sector to notice the advantages of using Telegram is online shopping and eCommerce.
Telegram has also recognized the importance of the eCommerce market. In April 2021, they strengthened the app’s digital payment capabilities with Payments 2.0. Telegram now allows merchants to accept payments with various approved gateways, including Stripe.
Although this is now formally built into Telegram, determined online retailers could already action these payments due to inbuilt flexibility built into Telegram. The app allows you to use bots for various purposes, so tech-minded people have created eCommerce bots to add capabilities to the core Telegram.
Custom payment bots may strictly be unnecessary in Telegram now. However, you will still find a variety of bots that provide handy features for eCommerce firms, including bots that accept payments from Telegram users worldwide.
9 Best eCommerce Bots for Telegram:
How Telegram Works
Telegram has many similar features to WhatsApp. Its primary focus is on enabling real-time private chats. You can have group chats with up to 200 members in a regular group and 500 members in a supergroup. You can also create message channels where administrators can publish messages but don’t engage in conversation.
Telegrams’ key point of difference over WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger is a high level of security; users know that Telegram uses encryption, and their personal details are safe. Another advantage of Telegram is not having to share your phone number to access the app. Also, you can share videos without limits. Being fully cloud-based, you can access your Telegram account from any device.
However, Telegram’s fully customizable bots and open API are strong selling points. You can use bots for multiple purposes, including chatbots, inevitably, and also to carry out automated tasks.
Telegram Now Has Strong eCommerce Capabilities
Online retailers are beginning to notice Telegram because it can work so well for eCommerce. Vulcan Post has summarized ways eCommerce firms can use Telegram as being:
- Sharing content and links with followers
- Organizing groups where fans can interact with the brand and each other
- Reaching out to followers and group members through in-app push notifications they see on their phones
- Providing customer support
- Showcasing products and services
- Making sales, sending invoices, and collecting payments directly within the app using a preferred gateway, anywhere the world
You can use Telegram to supplement or even replace many of your direct marketing tools, including email, live chats, social media accounts, customer support, and even your eCommerce store itself. Telegram doesn’t even charge commission for using its services for eCommerce. The only payments you make are to your payment processors, like Stripe.
To do much of this, you first have to find a relevant existing app or create your own, using something like BotFather or BotMother (themselves bots, see more details in the list below).
Suggested Ways to Use Telegram for eCommerce
With all of these eCommerce capabilities, allied with the freedom to use bots, eCommerce firms can do many things using Telegram as a marketing tool.
Of course, the same rules of marketing apply to Telegram marketing as they do to anything else. You have to nudge your customers / potential clients through a sales journey. You can’t rush in and try to sell goods to them on your first encounter. This means that you should begin slowly, learning about your audience and their tastes, generating engagement, and boosting your brand image before you attempt to jump into social commerce and sell directly from the app. Indeed, looking at the big picture, Telegram marketing is very similar to any other type of content marketing – just you can use bots to simplify the process.
You need to begin by building a following for your channel. For example, cross-promote your Telegram channel on your other social accounts. You could also create some form of lead magnet to encourage them to follow you to the platform, some gift in return for them following your account.
As you grow your followers and move them to different stages of your conversion path, you may need to segment them into groups to ensure that you are sending the right messages to the right people. You can do this by creating a series of specialist channels to complement your main group channel.
You can then use bots to automate many of the activities in these channels. For example, you could add a bot to automatically publish your blog posts or accept payments for your products (once you have shifted people sufficiently through the buying cycle).
Some firms now use Telegram as a customer service channel, using chatbots to assist in the process. Some of the most popular uses for chatbots on Telegram include:
- Mass mailing, using Telegram in the place of (or in conjunction with) email
- Sending transactional messages, for example, thankyou messages when somebody purchases goods, explaining your after-sales service
- As a first point of contact for leads
- Delivering important notices
- Providing information support
However, you will also find many other types of bots that can help you automate and save time when using Telegram.
Best eCommerce Bots for Telegram
1. Amazon Europe Price Compare
The Amazon Europe Price Compare bot is from ChatBottle. This bot gives you a list of the prices of an item in the various Amazon stores. Send a link to the item to the bot, and it will return a list of what the item costs at each Amazon store.
2. AppFollow - @appfollowbot
You can use the AppFollow Bot to discover the App Store and Google Play and give you insight into your apps. Use it to find the top apps for a particular category, search results for a keyword, suggestions for a search term, trending App Store searches, and app details. You can change both your default device and default country in the settings.
3. Babelgram - @BabelgramBot
Babelgram is handy when speaking to somebody who uses a different language, perhaps a potential customer or somebody asking for customer service. You can use it to translate your messages in any group chat or use it in line to translate directly in any conversation. It supports a wide range of languages.
4. BotFather - @BotFather
While you now find a selection of Telegram bots available for firms to use, many businesses still see a need to create their own. You have three main ways you can go about this. First, you could pay a specialist firm, like Chatfuel (see below), to create a Telegram bot for you. Secondly, you could use an existing bot you find. Alternatively, many eCommerce businesses create custom bots internally.
The bot, BotFather, is an excellent place to start the process of making a bot yourself. It leads you to Telegram’s online help files and its API manual. You can use it to create new bot accounts and manage your existing bots.
5. BotMother
While BotFather is better known if you are bot building, BotMother is an alternative cross-platform constructor to create bots for business. It is a multi-platform bot builder for Telegram, WhatsApp, Instagram, Viber, Facebook, Vkontakte, and Odnoklassniki.
You can create bots that accept payments via Pay Online, bePaid, Robokassa, and internal Telegram payments. It includes built-in analytics, with the bot collecting user responses and maintaining statistics. You can easily integrate with Zapier, so you can send data from forms to virtually any service.
6. Chatfuel News Channel - @chatfuel
Chatfuel is a platform you can use to build no-code chatbots for your business. You can create a customized one for your business with Chatfuel’s drag-and-drop builder. With a chatbot, your brand can reply instantly, 24/7. A bot can resolve up to 80% of customer inquiries.
You can use Chatfuel to make unlimited bots for your Telegram channel. The company provides a large number of templates to give you a starting point in customizing your bot. You can even build complex non-linear bots. It is relatively easy to integrate your Chatfuel bots with other platforms, such as YouTube, WordPress, and Twitter
Somewhat appropriately, Chatfuel has created and made available to all a Telegram news bot - @chatfuel. This showcases some of the company’s bot creation work. These include bots for the Forbes news channel (@forbesbot) and TechCrunch (@techcrunchbot).
While these are not eCommerce specific, they showcase the types of bots an eCommerce store could consider commissioning to help with its content marketing.
7. Flow XO
Flow XO is another platform that offers you a simple way to create bots for Telegram. They advertise that you can create a chatbot with zero coding skills required. Flow XO is a powerful automation product that allows you to quickly and simply build AI chatbot solutions that help you communicate and engage with your customers. Flow XO customers have developed a range of chatbots that are completing various tasks to help them communicate with their customers.
Some use cases for chatbots you create with Flow XO include providing light-hearted entertainment, providing a virtual welcome mat to your business, answering simple questions, gathering information, accepting payments, live chat, and pre-filter leads.
The ‘intelligence’ behind a Flow XO chatbot is created using a powerful workflow, and you can have an infinite number of these running in your chat window.
8. Skeddy - @SkeddyBot
Skeddy is a simple yet powerful reminder tool that can help you create and manage your reminders. Once you set your reminders, Skeddy sends you a notification at the specified time via Telegram.
You can create simple reminders using natural language. However, you can also create more complex schedules, e.g., “pay Web Hosting bill every 1st day of the month.” When you receive a reminder, you can use predefined inline buttons to tell the bot to remind you again at another time. You can look at your reminders list anytime, both in the Telegram client and the bot Web interface.
9. Yellow.ai (Formerly Yellow Messenger)
Yellow.ai is primarily a leading CX automation platform, strongly involved in conversational commerce. They recognize the benefits of engaging your customers wherever they are, through conversational virtual assistants, across text and voice, for faster conversions, higher CSAT, and lasting loyalty.
One of Yellow.ai’s features is a no-code platform to build a bot in under ten clicks. You can make a bot quickly with no code input and without developer dependence. It’s as easy as drag-and-drop.
You can power your bots with 100+ integrations. You can also use marketplace templates, integrations, and nodes, to save time and simplify your bot creation process.
By adding an Authorization token, Telegram bots of any business can connect with the Yellow.ai platform.
