Conversational commerce
What is Conversational commerce?
Conversational commerce is the practice of completing a purchase — browsing a catalog, adding to cart, paying, and getting order updates — inside the same messaging thread a customer already uses to chat with a business, on channels like WhatsApp, RCS, and SMS, rather than redirecting them to a separate website or app. Marketer Chris Messina coined the term in 2015 to describe commerce conducted through chat and AI-driven conversational interfaces instead of traditional storefronts.
More detail
Unlike a scripted IVR menu or a rules-based FAQ bot, modern conversational commerce is usually AI-assisted — a chatbot or AI agent answers product questions, recommends items, and can complete checkout in the same thread, often escalating to a human agent only when the conversation needs it.
The channel matters for what's possible: WhatsApp and RCS support native rich cards, product catalogs, and in-thread checkout, while SMS and voice IVR typically hand off to a hosted pay-by-link page since they can't render an interactive cart natively.
Frequently asked
- Who coined the term "conversational commerce"?
- Marketer Chris Messina coined it in 2015 to describe customer-initiated transactions completed through messaging apps and chat-based interfaces rather than a traditional web storefront or app.
- Is conversational commerce the same as chatbot commerce?
- Chatbot-driven purchasing is one common form of conversational commerce, but the category also covers human-agent-assisted sales and hybrid flows where an AI agent or a person can pick up the same in-thread cart and checkout.
See also
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