Retail Chatbots’ Main Themes and Research over Time: A Bibliometric and Content Analysis

The purpose of this study is to analyze the most important themes and changes over time in retail chatbots’ research, using a bibliometric and content analysis of documents from Web of Science archive. The five identified themes are related with chatbots, e-retail applications, and online relationship marketing general and specific contexts’ characterization; shopper stimulus to use chatbots in retail and COVID-19 effects; barriers to consumer adoption of retail chatbots; user experience with chatbots in their consumer journey; and chatbots’ effectiveness and their relationship with customer satisfaction. This study contributes to the field by providing researchers the best practices and tendencies about retail chatbots. For practitioners, it offers guidance to create effective retail chatbots.