How Conversational Commerce is Changing the Retail Sales Journey
Originally coined by Chris Messina (inventor of the #hashtag) back in 2015, conversational commerce marries text messaging with e-commerce, empowering retailers to better manage the entire customer journey, from origination and customer service, all the way to checkout. Brands are tapping this trend by integrating real-time messaging throughout various parts of the customer journey. Essentially, conversational commerce is the ability to conduct an entire transaction over WhatsApp, iMessage or another messaging service, instead of a web store or shopping app.
When shopping online, consumers are seeking out the more personalized feel of an in-shop experience delivered in a way they’re familiar with, all while sitting on their own couch. Conversational commerce allows retailers and e-commerce companies to do just that — which ultimately results in a better customer experience and ultimately increased sales.
The Evolution of Conversational Commerce
In 2025, global spending over conversational commerce channels worldwide is expected to reach $290 billion. Tech advancements in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and natural language processing will continue to drive growth as AI-enabled chatbots are revolutionizing customer service capabilities for retailers, while helping reduce costs.
Beyond enhancing customer service, conversational commerce also helps retailers reduce cart abandonment — which causes brands to lose around $18 billion in annual sales — by essentially eliminating the “cart.” Instead, purchases are completed directly within the customers’ preferred messaging channel. There’s no need to switch between browser windows or mobile apps, or sign-in to retailer accounts. As a result, transactions become quick and convenient, mitigating pain points in the sales journey that would otherwise make consumers abandon their cart.
Other features of conversational commerce include instant status updates for deliveries and returns, enhanced customer support and FAQ capabilities, post-purchase support and feedback, and more.
How Retail Brands Can Execute
When developing a conversational commerce strategy, brands should consider the channels their customers engage with most, as well as the functionality of those channels. WhatsApp and iMessage are widely used platforms that also offer sales capabilities through business APIs, making them ideal channels for retailers to engage with customers.
Rich communication services (RCS) has also become one of the fastest growing channels for conversational commerce. Following Apple’s recent support, RCS has been dubbed the next generation of text messaging, as it offers features such as high-resolution images and video, real-time customer service, location and file sharing, and interactive elements that enable recipients to easily purchase goods, make payments, and more. RCS is an effective channel for conversational commerce thanks to its proven ability to keep customers engaged. Research shows that brands running RCS campaigns, with rich cards including images, text and links, experience a 60 percent to 70 percent higher conversion rate than campaigns deployed across the more rudimentary multimedia message (MMS).
Once a brand chooses which channel is most appropriate, identify which part of the customer journey you want conversational commerce to address. If you’re looking to enhance customer service, then a post-purchase support chatbot on WhatsApp could be beneficial. If the goal is to boost sales, then consider deploying an AI-enabled personal shopping assistant through RCS. After introducing conversational commerce to address a specific role, it can be expanded to support additional touchpoints throughout the customer journey.
Measuring Impact
Key performance indicators (KPIs) for conversational commerce will vary depending on how a retailer implements its strategy and which stages of the customer journey it’s addressing. Specific KPIs to consider include conversion rates, cart abatement rates, customer satisfaction scores and average response time.
KPIs will be unique to each retailer, but given the consumer shift toward conversational experiences, brands that deploy conversational commerce within their sales journey will meet modern customers' expectations. By providing instant satisfaction, retailers can both enhance customer experience while also boosting the bottom line.
Ethan Gustav is group president, North America at Infobip, an omnichannel marketing platform.
Ethan is a senior executive with over 20 years of experience in the mobile Industry, with over half of that spent directly in the high-growth A2P Messaging and CPaaS spaces.
Today Ethan serves as Group President North America at Infobip (and member of the Executive Leadership Team) where he’s responsible for Infobip’s go-to-market strategy and execution with functional responsibility over Revenue, Product, Operations, and Operator Partnerships (Carrier Sales, Relations, and Compliance).
Prior to Infobip, Ethan served as Chief Revenue Officer at OpenMarket where he led doubling the company’s revenue and reaching a commanding 50% share in the US Short Code market over his tenure. Ethan was then instrumental in helping lead the M&A process and eventual sale of OpenMarket to Infobip.
Before OpenMarket, Ethan served in various senior leadership positions at Amdocs partnering and operating large-scale P&L engagements with major US and Canadian Carriers.
His career in Mobile began at T-Mobile US and just prior to that, digital media services startup, Loudeye Technologies.
