With conversational commerce becoming a must-have for online businesses to grow, the number of businesses using WhatsApp is increasing by the day. Statistics show that as of today, there are ten thousands of messages exchanged between consumers and business accounts on WhatsApp, highlighting an opportunity for brands to tap into the need for consumers to ‘talk’ to brands before making a purchase.
Owing to the features and capabilities of the WhatsApp Business API, this is now possible. But to put it to work for marketing, sales and support, businesses need more than just a WhatsApp Business account - access to the WhatsApp Business API and that’s where a service provider comes into the picture.
In this piece, we intend to help you choose the best WhatsApp Business API service provider. We’re going to give you a detailed comparison between BiteSpeed and QuickReply.ai.
In the following sections, we’re going to compare the two WhatsApp Business API solution providers from the perspective of an ecommerce business. But if you’d require a deep dive into any of the following, you can reach out to our Shopify experts here.
Both BiteSpeed and QuickReply.ai have a focus on enabling marketing campaigns for online businesses. But the area of focus of the two WhatsApp Business API solution providers is slightly different.
BiteSpeed has a split focus and aims to solve two problems across two different markets. They are simplifying Messenger Marketing for the West (US and Canada), while addressing WhatsApp marketing for India. On the other hand, QuickReply.ai is entirely focused on WhatsApp as a key channel of growth for DTC businesses across the world. This keeps their app feature focus streamlined and gives them the ability to keep up with the changing market requirements more rapidly.
To be able to get started with using WhatsApp for business, you will require a number of widgets and opt-in tools set up across the buyer journey. Both the WhatsApp Business API service providers come with multiple types of widgets that can be set up as live chat, in the announcement bar, as subscription boxes, on the product page, thank you page and similar.
This helps businesses tap into the key moments of a purchase journey, leading to a higher number of opt-ins. QuickReply.ai also additionally comes with an WhatsApp automation workflow to confirm the opt-in and trigger the welcome message.
Also read: How to get WhatsApp Business opt-ins from your customers
As an ecommerce business owner, you will require setting up a series of campaigns to keep consumers engaged from the day they opt-in to the point of purchase and then after. To be able to do this, you require setting up automations to create drip campaigns for the flows such as - welcome, abandoned cart recovery, order status, product review request, browse abandonment and others.
While both BiteSpeed and QuickReply.ai both come with workflows, there is one key difference between the two. BiteSpeed comes with only predefined campaigns and flows which are good for beginners; but it offers very little capabilities for customizations. For example, only 2 cart recovery messages are allowed, you cannot have different journeys for different buyer personas and you cannot add an additional chatbot flow to the mix.
On the other hand, QuickReply.ai workflows are fully customizable; enabling businesses to tailor buyer journeys as per their target market, business goals and objectives. Some of the customizable WhatsApp automation workflows include the use of the following WhatsApp chatbots:
To be able to set up automations for the above workflows, you will require using a number of WhatsApp templates. WhatsApp templates are messages that are formatted to suit the messaging platform’s interface and are created keeping in mind different business goals like driving traffic to the website, promoting a discount and so on.
While BiteSpeed can help you set up and create WhatsApp templates for your campaigns, QuickReply.ai comes with thousands of ready-to-use and editable ones. The library includes everything from season campaign WhatsApp templates to those for abandoned cart recovery, promotions, product review requests, customer support, BFCM sale and other occasions. The team can also help you create new WhatsApp templates for campaigns. Check them all out here.
As compared to BiteSpeed’s automations, QuickReply.ai has taken into account even advanced business use cases. Keeping in mind the shift in consumer behavior during and post the pandemic, QuickReply.ai has built out custom workflow automations for use cases including the following:
Personalization is key to succeeding with WhatsApp marketing. But to be able to do so, your solution provider needs to be able to process consumer data in real-time and enable easy segmentation of your WhatsApp list.
When you compare the two WhatsApp Business API providers, QuickReply.ai comes with advanced customer profiling and segmentation. It is able to continually monitor the response of consumers to campaigns, understanding their demographics, psychographics, purchase patterns and behaviors. This helps plan timely and contextual campaigns, leading to better ROI from WhatsApp.
Also read: WhatsApp broadcast messages to increase sales from various customer segments
As you start to explore more use cases of the WhatsApp Business API - namely, broadcasts, promotions, customer support, sales and follow-ups, the costs can quickly increase. This is because WhatsApp charges per conversation, and owing to the use of the app, your opt-ins are more likely to respond to the campaigns you send.
As compared to BiteSpeed, QuickReply.ai is more business-friendly. From the get-go, it is cost-effective and the plans have a lot more features as well as flexibility to offer; this makes QuickReply.ai the best alternative to BiteSpeed for the WhatsApp Business API.
As you start using WhatsApp for different purposes - marketing, sales and support, you will need to bring in more team members to collaborate with you. This is important to ensure timeliness of conversations.
While automations can help you keep the conversations going, there are times when you will need to step in manually. This is where giving access to multiple agents on the same WhatsApp Business becomes important.
For agent productivity and collaboration, QuickReply.ai comes with the ability to add multiple members, as well as a shared inbox. The inbox also includes features like tags and labels to keep conversations streamlined at all times.
The only way to optimize your campaigns on WhatsApp is to keep a close eye on the performance of every message you send across - broadcasts, abandoned cart recovery, engagement campaigns, and so on.
QuickReply.ai offers WhatsApp-specific metrics on an in-depth analytics dashboard to help understand how different segments are interacting with your business on the messaging app. On the flip side, BiteSpeed analytics includes multi-channel metrics, which require sifting to calculate the effectiveness of WhatsApp for the brand.
Both BiteSpeed and QuickReply.ai have rapidly established an audience in their target market. But as consumer expectations evolve and business needs change, it is important to use a WhatsApp Business API solution provider that can adapt to it all. This is where QuickReply.ai wins!
Chosen by leading Shopify and Shopify Plus brands, QuickReply.ai is the best WhatsApp Business API solution for ecommerce businesses. With an easy-to-use interface, powerful WhatsApp chatbot workflows, customizable automations and readily available WhatsApp templates, the app has it all to help businesses make the most of WhatsApp for marketing, support and sales to double their revenue.
Tool and strategies modern teams need to help their companies grow.
Leverage the untapped growth potential of WhatsApp marketing to acquire and retain customers.
BiteSpeed is WhatsApp marketing and omnichannel customer support platform for online businesses. Their goal is to bring back conversations into support queries and marketing campaigns with the help of automations on WhatsApp, email, Facebook Messenger and Instagram. To understand Bitespeed's pricing, checkout out our blog on an analysis of Bitespeed's pricing.
QuickReply.ai is a WhatsApp Business API solution provider exclusively built for ecommerce businesses to tap into the potential of conversational commerce using the capabilities of the messaging platform. It combines the power of the WhatsApp Business API with smart automations, AI and a seamless integration with Shopify.
The QuickReply.ai WhatsApp comes with the following features that makes it a leading choice for ecommerce businesses:
