Does a live chat feature increase your conversions?

Yes it does. Been using live chat for a while ...

Sure does! I've been using Olark for almost a couple of months now and my conversions have been great. Their software is also cool as it can tell you real-time how many viewers are looking at your site.

Real and genuine interaction with the site owner can definitely help and increase your sales/conversions. That's what people look for in many sites, though not a lot of people have gotten into the trend and think it may be too complicated or time consuming..

I've used live chat for my business website, but never thought of using it for affiliate sites. That's a great idea and a way to get a lot of mileage from a live chat subscription. I may have to give it a try.

Although I've never tested it on Affiliate/Review sites, I have thoroughly tested it on digital products and services in various markets.

Here were the results (the best I can remember off the top of my head)...

For very high dollar products, coaching, etc. (pretty much anything over $1000) it boasted conversions significantly (somewhere around 10%-15% depending upon the market if I remember correctly). Of course these transactions are more rare than lower priced sales so the test data was gathered from a smaller sample than would normally be used.

Interestingly, at this price point many clients actually used the live chat to ask pre-sales questions before ordering.

However, for standard digital products & lower priced transactions, the statistics in most (but not all markets) showed that providing live chat had little impact on conversions (a statistical tie).

In certain markets (mostly smaller hobby type markets) it did help conversions but mostly because customers would contact support because they wanted to order but didn't want to order online so they contacted live chat to find out how to mail or phone in their order.

Christina's Skype idea might be worth trying and if you find offering that option helps your conversions, then you can considering adding live chat functionality.

I forgot to mention the most important part... although it's not really relevant to an affiliate/review site...

Offering live chat ON THE ACTUAL ORDER FORM significantly helped lower shopping cart abandonment thus increasing conversions. And strangely, almost no one would use the chat feature on the order form so just being there seemed to bump conversions.

This was a consistent result across all markets it was tested in (although some markets couldn't be tested due to not being able to add chat to the order form in the shopping cart used in those markets, carts like clickbank, etc.)

yes it does, i recall a seo firm of mine working hard on getting a live chat because it provides a better customer support, as simple as that!

In my experience it does - if you're willing to be 'online'.

It can decrease conversions if you have it show 'operator is offline' etc - especially if this is during the day. It just looks as if nobody is visible in your business.

I user Comm100 - which is free and bloody fantastic (the support staff even installed onto my site for me!) and I have it set to just not show at all if I am offline, so visitors don't even know it exists. This saves me ever showing as 'offline'.

They have a great smartphone app also, so I can be converting customers with questions while wandering around a mall....

It has greatly increased customer relationship in my business but I think it depends on what you sell though. For services it works well and has increased sales greatly.

Hi Resellcells,

Yes it will, especially if:

=>> Your employees manning your online live chat portal have intermediate to expert experience and training in using your affiliate products...

=>> Your affiliate products are technology-based and finance-based among other niche products that most interested buyers would most likely find quite difficult to understand at first, so they could possibly think and feel it's their best move to ask an expert about those products...

Anyway, this is based on my experience running my company on my own in one to two months after business startup, which was Sept 2006, and though our business doesn't market affiliate products and we didn't have an online live portal back then -- We don't have one up until today, I'd still believe this could most likely improve our sales, because interested buyers want immediate answers to their queries, and this is just based on how I analyze this situation...

I do believe users like it when that have the option to chat now and with highly helpful staff...on the other hand they find frequent pop-up live chats annoying...

Live chat option absolutely increases your conversions. There are services that you only have to pay them when they make a sale that would have otherwise been lost.

In my experience, I have seen live chat work the best with online lead generation through call centers. Basically the live chat operator will give the person an option to call in and/or receive a phone call. When that person gets on the phone they will on average spend much more (or give much more information) than they would by just going through an online pathway.

But all in all, I would say it is definitely worth split-testing on whatever site you were thinking of placing it on.

Live chat can increase your conversions, just as long as it is a real person on the other end and not a fake live chat bot. Make sure that if you are outsourcing the live chat functionality that your outsourcer knows as much as possible about the products and services being offered on the website.

most people want answer yesterday.

so for the customers that you help with the niggling questions...you are more likely to get sales....but you will have to know the questions, and if you outsource this, it will not be the same.

Make sure to be VERY clear your hours of operations to all your visitors as you can really get a lot of questions at the worst time. I do agree it increases conversion but also requires more of your time. I would really get a VA for that if your not ready to handle the load of questions you will receive as your business get bigger.