Conversational commerce is e-commerce done via various means of conversation ( live support on e-commerce Web sites, online chat using messaging apps, chatbots on messaging apps or websites, voice assistants) and using technology such as: speech recognition, speaker recognition (voice biometrics),

natural language processing Natural language processing (NLP) is an interdisciplinary subfield of linguistics, computer science, and artificial intelligence concerned with the interactions between computers and human language, in particular how to program computers to pro ...

and artificial intelligence.

Development

WeChat in China

During this time, in China, e-commerce via WeChat – at its core a messaging app, but also letting merchants display their goods in mobile Web pages and via social feeds – grew strongly. By 2013 e-commerce in China had overtaken that of the U.S.

Facebook Messenger

In 2016, Facebook announced its Facebook Messenger chatbot platform, heralding the arrival of conversational commerce via the most widely used messaging app in the world outside China. More than 34,000 businesses had opened shop on Messenger by August 2017. Early cited examples of conversational commerce chatbots on Facebook Messenger include

1-800-FLOWERS 1-800-Flowers.com, Inc. is a floral and foods gift retailer and distribution company in the United States. The company's focus, except for Mother's Day and Valentine's Day, is on gift baskets. They also use the name ''1-800-Baskets.com''. Their ...

with an

IBM Watson IBM Watson is a question-answering computer system capable of answering questions posed in natural language, developed in IBM's DeepQA project by a research team led by principal investigator David Ferrucci. Watson was named after IBM's founder ...

artificial intelligence-powered chatbot/assistant, and Mexican airline Aeroméxico, whose chat platform running on Yalochat lets customers search, book, track, or check in for flights; ask any question, using A.I. and NLP to provide answers; or pull the chatbot into a group chat.

Apple Business Chat

In June 2017, Apple announced its Apple Business Chat product, allowing consumers and businesses to message each other via the

Messages A message is a discrete unit of communication intended by the source for consumption by some recipient or group of recipients. A message may be delivered by various means, including courier, telegraphy, carrier pigeon and electronic bus. A ...

app.

In September 2017 WhatsApp announced the pilot of its new Enterprise solution, the first time large companies would be able to attend to large groups of customers in an approved WhatsApp solution, after WhatsApp banned earlier unofficial solutions. Companies who piloted the solution included airlines Aeromexico, KLM, Latin American online travel agency Despegar and online retailer Linio. Enterprise solutions for Whatsapp have been available since 2015 from a variety of third-party vendors, and though unofficial, they have been used by major companies and governments including the Governments of Colombia and Costa Rica.

Podium

In March of 2020, Podium announced a contactless payment solution allowing local businesses to accept payments through two-way

SMS Short Message/Messaging Service, commonly abbreviated as SMS, is a text messaging service component of most telephone, Internet and mobile device systems. It uses standardized communication protocols that let mobile devices exchange short text ...

text message conversations with customers. Outside of traditional instore card-present transactions, there existed only a few options for businesses to accept payments, most of which were not secure,

PCI compliant The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) is an information security standard used to handle credit cards from major card brands. The standard is administered by the Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council and its use i ...

, or convenient. Through Podium Payments, businesses can engage with customers and securely close sales all within the same convenient channel.

In May 2017 Telegram supported basic payments in chats using bots and in April 2021, the payment 2.0 that supports payment in more than 200 countries via integration with 9 different payment providers.

Alexa and Google Assistant

Both Amazon and Google are providing APIs to enable payment via voice chat using stored payment credentials in

Google Pay Google Pay may refer to: * Google Pay (mobile app), a mobile payments app introduced in 2020 * Google Pay (2018–2022), a digital wallet app introduced in 2018, now Google Wallet * Google Pay (payment method), a digital payments service introduced ...

or Amazon Pay.

Web chat

Although, they don't have any functionalities to facilitate actual transactions within the conversation, companies like LiveChat Software
CM.com
and LivePerson have powered live conversations between customers and live agents as far back as the 2000s, before retail businesses used messaging apps to communicate with customers.

References

{{reflist E-commerce Instant messaging