Why social media teams will be at the center of conversational commerce

The next frontier of ecommerce is already here—regardless if consumers and brands are ready or not.

It certainly caught one family in Texas off guard a few years ago. What started out as a conversation between a six-year-old girl and the family’s Amazon Echo Dot turned into an order for a dollhouse and four pounds of sugar cookies.

Known as conversational commerce, this buying experience offers customers even greater convenience and enables brands to engage shoppers in more personalized ways. In this article, we’ll dig into what conversational commerce is and what it isn’t, how brands should approach their commerce strategies and why they need to involve their social teams from the get go.

What is conversational commerce?

Conversational commerce sits at the intersection of messaging apps and shopping, giving consumers an opportunity to buy from brands through chat apps and even voice technology. According to Chris Messina, who coined the term in 2015, conversational commerce is about “delivering convenience, personalization and decision support while people are on the go, with only partial attention to spare.” It’s what enables a customer to chat with customer service agents or a bot, ask questions, read reviews and make a purchase all within an app like Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp.

Imagine, for example, you reach out to a brand on Facebook Messenger because you’re looking for a particular shoe. Not only does the customer service representative you’re talking to find the product for you, they’re also able to complete your transaction in the chat. Conversational commerce can even be used to confirm your attendance at a brand event over text message instead of navigating to a separate signup page.

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While conversational commerce often takes place on social media messaging apps, it’s not quite the same as social commerce. The former refers to purchases made directly from a one-to-one chat app while the latter is specific to the buying and selling of goods or services within a social media platform.

A better way to understand the difference between the two types of commerce strategies is to breakdown which platforms are used in each scenario:

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