What Can You Build with Conversational Commerce?
Plenty. Although we have to define what or how the terms are used in the first place. In Chris Messina’s words, he defines Conversational Commerce as the “utilization of messaging/chat platform, including other natural languages interface to interact with people, brands, services and bots that previously have no place in bidirectional, asynchronous messaging context”.
In layman’s terms:
- The messaging/chat platform refers to the likes of Messenger, WhatsApp, Telegram or Slack.
- “Utilizing the platform” means taking advantage of the SDKs that these platforms offer to build on top of it. Like how you can now call an Uber through Messenger (or Slack).
- “Other natural languages interfaces” translates to software like Siri, Google Now or IoT devices that receive inputs through your voice/other means (think Apple Watch) and complete your requests through it.
- “To interact with people, brands, services and bots that previously have no place in bidirectional, asynchronous messaging context” means a shift in perspective of how commerce works. Until now, at least, digital commerce means having an online presence such as yourstore.co.uk where a store can list their items and customers could order through them. This applies to brands like UNIQLO or mass markets like Zalora or Alibaba. With Conversational Commerce, the landscape changed to that of communication-based sales with customers “conversing” with brands or bots who assist and fulfil that service. You can think of it like the next level of communicating to pages/brands in Facebook, only that instead of just receiving customer service at Nike Running UK or being redirected to the shopping site for adidas Football, now you can start doing more things like ordering shoes from them through Messenger (or from an intermediary like Zappos too, if they decide to give it a shot through messaging platform).
Now that we have addressed the matter of definition, it’ll be helpful for us to observe some examples that have been leveraging this new paradigm. Meet Assist.
Will everything move to the conversational paradigm?
No, but there are a lot of apps that shouldn’t exist as stand-alone apps, and that are wallowing in obscurity or disuse. Chris Messina — (2016 Will be the Year of Conversational Commerce)
Assist is kinda the answer to that passage. Think of any services, apps or startups that fulfil your on-demand requests that require you to install yet another new application in your phone. There’s a reason why some startups dwelling on this industry have starting to rely on SMS services again (think Magic, or regionally, Helpr): because text messaging is a feature that’s available to everybody with a phone, even a Nokia 3310. Now that Messenger has 800 millions active users per month and WhatsApp is closing in at 1 billion users globally, building solutions on top of these platforms means communicating and connecting directly to your users almost instantaneously, in every parts of the world.
To describe the experience in a sentence: it felt like an interactive mixture of text messaging and buying data plans/checking your subscription through your carrier network, only that the messages are longer and detailed, and the bots actually sent me a GIF of bears waving at me (plus pictures of the related foods that interest me with useful information like the store’s opening time).
It felt like talking to the know-it-all person you normally bug for information, only that instead of his casual nagging of how you should Google things for yourself, this one actually Google it out for you. Sweet. If you can relate to these small cases that you encounter almost everyday, now you should start comprehending where we are going with Conversational Commerce and what it is.
In the paragraphs above, Assist was brought up as a good example that have been running/working on Messenger, but there are many startups/ideas that have been taking advantage of the technology that chat/messaging have to offer too. The two possible categories that you can build in line with Conversational Commerce, for example, are typically compiled to:
1. Bots + Integrations
2. Data Detectors
Both options rely heavily on building on top of existing platforms although the latter certainly involves deeper linking with operating systems/browsers in use. The Slack App Directory is a good model for what the first choice might have to offer, and it’s possibly the direction in which Messenger will want to go forward.
Development wise, it means that there’s no longer a need to build an interface to onboard users and developers can focus on building the infrastructure of services instead. However, this might cause an argument of dependencies since the number of users reached are now capped with how fast these messaging platforms can grow their user bases (which explains Facebook’s/Google’s initiatives at providing internet access to the next billion with Aquila, Free Basics or Loon)
Nevertheless, the shift to Conversational Commerce will happen really soon with number of transactions and services moving seamlessly between your chat messages. It’s an exciting time.
Conversational commerce is about delivering convenience, personalization, and decision support while people are on the go, with only partial attention to spare. — Chris Messina
This post is a reaction to Chris Messina’s recent writings (2016 Will be the Year of Conversational Commerce and Conversational Commerce). Most of the quotes included here are referenced from the writings mentioned above. Do give them a quick read.
