Hello, I am thinking about adding a live chat feature to my online store. I don't know much about them at all, but does anyone have any recommendations? It would need to be just one with typing, not any speaking and would need some sort of widget so that it would show on my site if live support was open or not. Thanks
Liveperson seems to be very popular, and it seems to function very well when I've used it in the past (as a client). If you are running WHMCS their live chat addon is very good but requires a windows computer unfortunately (can't run on server). If you're looking for a free solution I recommend Helpcenterlive.com it's a very good script and open source! good luck.
I was thinking to use LiveChat as well for my website. Hubb, thank you very much for the advises. I'll try one. Anyone, if you have any other solutions, please!
Make a try on AJ Help Desk -Live chat script. It will make your chat more effective with multiple features.
I really recommend LiveChat from www.livechatinc.com. Reliable, secure, checked by a lot of companies. Great price/value ratio!
Livezilla -> Free with great features. Liveperson, Zopim -> Paid but are great. phplivesupport.com is also very good with very affordable price.
Give BoldChat a try. I recently read that they were voted into Internet Retailer's top 3 for live chat services, so they are a major player. They have a pretty good client list on their website, and they have outstanding customer service. We have really benefited from having BoldChat's Basic product ($29/mo. if I recall). Our chat ROI was very positive after we got some help from them on best practices for implementing chat. They really knew their stuff. NOTE: LivePerson is a major player, also, and they have a good product. However, I have run into a few websites that use their service -- VerizonWireless.com comes to mind -- that had a significant page loading performance issue due to LivePerson. It hung my browser a couple of times, so I ended up calling Verizon for help instead of using chat. I could see in my task bar that the download of the page was being held up for several seconds by something with liveperson in the URL. I'm glad we didn't decide to go with them for our chat service because of this.
You should give Olark (www.olark.com) a try . We support really nice features for online stores like Shopify, like notifications when customers are adding/removing cart items, cart balance shown in your Instant Messenger buddy list, etc. If you don't use Shopify, and you have access to a developer, you can add these features to any other shopping cart using our API (http://www.olark.com/docs). Hope that helps!
With current broadband internet available almost anywhere live webcam chat is the most communicative tool that should be on a modern website.
There are many good providers of free and paid live chat services. Depends on whether you want to run the server-side of the chat software (or not). For Livezilla you'll need to install/configure on your own server. If you go with a hosted solution, you just add HTML coding to the webpages where you want the live chat button to appear. Keep in mind that some services have only 'Windows-based' operator (chat) consoles so Mac/*nix users will need to find web-based alternatives. Just about all live chat services have a free demo so it's best just to test out bunch and decide!