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If you’ve walked the streets of Rome, sat on the beach in Mexico, or pursued the markets in Moscow, you’re no stranger to the haggling game. In the bazaar—the price is never actually the price.

While you may love to strike a deal when visiting a physical marketplace, you’ve probably never even considered haggling prices with your favorite eCommerce merchants. After all, when you visit an online store, there’s no one there to bargain with, so the prices are set.

Or are they?

Nibble is a new eCommerce technology company that’s trying to disrupt eCommerce product pricing. The technology brings customer and merchant negotiation into the online shopping experience for Shopify stores. 

“Many people don’t think of online shopping as negotiation but it’s all give and take … 10% off for signing up to a mailing list, bigger discounts for bigger baskets, and better deals for loyal customers,” said Rosie Bailey, CEO and co-founder of Nibble.

Like Bailey says, offering discounts isn’t new, but there’s always room for innovation. And Nibble delivers by centralizing discounts right where customers are making purchasing decisions—product pages.

How Nibble works

Nibble works via a chatbot that merchants integrate into their Shopify store. The chatbot sits in the corner of a product screen, and when potential customers click on the bot, it starts the negotiation process.

Merchants pre-set which prices the chatbot will reject and which it will accept (not too dissimilar to selling on eBay,) so the bot is haggle-read. 

“Nibble offers our users a fun, engaging and personalised experience whilst allowing us to control our promotions in real-time,” said Nibble user and co-founder of PreSol, Samr Calcutawala in a press release.

To get a better idea of how the negotiation process works, I demoed the technology and started by big-time lowballing the chatbot. (I offered $25 for a $100 watch.)

In true negotiating fashion, the chatbot called me out and rejected my lowball offer.

I continued to raise my price while the chatbot lowered the price of the watch I was bidding on. Eventually, we agreed on $89.21, a 10.8% discount. 

Once we agreed on a price, the chatbot directed me to the checkout cart where I could make my purchase.

While 10.8% off is not my ideal discount, it’s better than paying full price. And this may be the biggest benefit—it kept me from doing what I (and many other consumers) normally do to get discounts: intentionally ditching the shopping cart and waiting for the brand’s abandoned cart recovery discount email.

In addition to incentivizing customers to finish the purchasing journey, Nibble has other benefits. According to Nibble, it:

• Boosts customer LTV
• Has a promotional impact
• Mitigates cart abandonment
• Helps capture email addresses
• Improves on-website conversions
• Allows you to personalize pricing at scale

Not to mention, it’s unique, fun, and already proven to boost engagement. In a case study, Lucky Voice gave this first-hand account, “Fantastic app has improved our conversion and having read through conversations our users have had with the Nibble; it has created some really great engagement. Would definitely recommend!” 

One potential caveat to Nibble might be the lack of human interaction when negotiating. However, some consumers prefer the chatbot experience to haggling with a live customer representative. “This [eCommerce price negotiation via a chatbot] sounds great to me. It’s definitely preferable to negotiating with an actual human,” says B2B freelance writer, ​​Aimee Pearcy.

Since its launch, Nibble has introduced new features, including allowing customers to negotiate on quantity in addition to price and a buy-back feature.