Transform Customer Conversations Into Revenue with Conversational Commerce

Customer experience beats price every time, but most brands still get it wrong.

You know the frustration: customers abandon carts, ignore follow-ups and choose competitors despite your competitive pricing. Traditional ecommerce feels impersonal and transactional, leaving money on the table while customers crave the human touch they'd get in a physical store.

The proof? Over 80% of customers now pay premium prices for better experiences, and the chatbot market is exploding from $5.1 billion to a projected $36.3 billion by 2032 — a 24% annual growth rate that signals the massive opportunity for early adopters.

Conversational commerce turns every digital interaction into a personalized experience, meeting customer needs and often leading them to checkout. This shift is driven by the rise of mobile-first and chat-first behaviors among consumers who increasingly want immediacy, personalization and convenience in their interactions with brands. In fact, 70% of brands use artificial intelligence to communicate with customers.

Here's what separates winners from wannabes in the conversational commerce game.

What is conversational commerce?

Conversational commerce, also known as chat commerce or conversational marketing, represents a way for online retailers to unleash the potential of conversation to sell their products and services. It operates by exploiting advanced technologies and direct, real-time interactions to improve sales and support between businesses and customers. At its core, it enables a shift from traditional form-based interactions to more immediate, personalized and convenient one-on-one messaging.

Understanding the definition is just the beginning. The real question is why this approach has become essential for businesses.

Why conversational commerce matters today

Conversational commerce enables businesses to engage with customers through real-time, two-way conversations. This channel is powered by advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML).

These technologies allow conversational commerce platforms to understand customer queries, provide relevant information, and guide them through their purchasing journey. AI enables more human-like, personalized conversations by facilitating automation, intent recognition, and continuous learning in commercial settings. NLP helps systems interpret and respond to human language, while ML allows these systems to learn and improve over time, based on interactions.

While often intertwined, conversational commerce focuses on direct, interactive conversations to drive sales and support, often within messaging apps or dedicated chat interfaces.

Social commerce, on the other hand, primarily involves selling products directly through social media platforms, leveraging features like shoppable posts or in-app marketplaces, though it can incorporate conversational elements.

These technological capabilities become most powerful when strategically applied throughout each stage of the customer journey.

The customer journey and conversational commerce

Conversational commerce gives ecommerce stores a chance to connect with customers at every step of their customer journey.

Awareness.

The awareness stage may be the most crucial stage of the entire funnel. This stage begins when a customer realizes they have a problem. They start to look for ways to solve it and discover you in the process.

You can sell great products and design beautiful pages, but how can customers purchase from you if they don't know who you are?

Conversational tools let you connect with customers who have just begun their journey and are searching for providers like you. You can use those tools to show customers that you understand their issues and know how to solve their problems.

Once customers discover your brand, their evaluation process intensifies.

Consideration.

Customers have already conducted preliminary research and learned a bit about you at this stage. However, their hunt for information hasn't stopped yet.

They're still looking for more information, comparing you with available competitors and reading user reviews. At this phase, you can use the power of conversation to give customers even more details to help them get to know your offer.

As customers narrow their options, your role shifts to providing final reassurance.

Decision.

This is the moment when the customer is ready to purchase. However, you shouldn't rest on your laurels, even if they chose you. You need to assure the customer that they are making the right choice.

At this stage, you must keep the conversation going to strengthen the customer's decision. Provide social proof and resolve issues instantly if any appear.

The sale marks the beginning, not the end, of your conversational relationship.

Retention.

If the customer has arrived at this stage, you've provided all they've needed so far.

That doesn't mean you can stop doing your best. Taking special care of customers who have arrived at this stage is highly beneficial, as data shows that it's five times cheaper to retain an existing customer than to acquire a new one.

To maintain a good relationship with your customer, you need to send communications from time to time and respond to their messages, even if they are negative.

Advocacy.

This is the last stage of the customer journey and the one that's the hardest to arrive at. By this point, the customer should be a brand ambassador who eagerly recommends products to their friends and family.

Beyond that, there are more potential benefits. If you continue the conversation with customers, you can ask them for testimonials or product reviews and make them feel a part of your brand story. Doing so can strengthen those relationships and give your business greater credibility among future customers.

Now that we've explored when to engage customers, let's examine the specific tools and channels that make these conversations possible.

Examples of conversational commerce

Implementing diverse conversational channels is essential for meeting customers where they are and providing seamless support across all touchpoints. By offering multiple communication options, businesses can cater to different customer preferences, increase accessibility, and create more opportunities for meaningful engagement throughout the customer journey.

Live chat.

Live chat stands out as one of the most effective communication channels, allowing agents to simultaneously assist multiple customers while reducing wait times and enhancing satisfaction. Beyond basic support, live chat apps offer significant ecommerce potential by enabling proactive engagement with website visitors who might not otherwise seek assistance. Agents can guide customers through product selections and provide personalized recommendations in real time.

While live chat provides human connection, automated solutions can extend your conversational reach even further.

Chatbots.

Chatbots represent automated software solutions that deliver instant responses to customer inquiries through text-based interactions. These systems excel at handling multiple conversations simultaneously while providing 24/7 availability. Their versatility allows deployment across websites and messaging platforms, creating consistent experiences throughout different stages of the customer journey. This automation makes chatbots a cornerstone of conversational commerce, enabling brands to maintain customer connections with minimal resource investment.

Messaging apps.

Popular messaging platforms like Messenger, WeChat, and WhatsApp serve as powerful channels for customer communication. These apps support rich media, including memes, GIFs, videos and emojis, helping maintain engaging and personalized conversations. With projected user growth to reach 4.6 billion by 2026, messaging apps represent consumers' preferred communication method for private discussions, brand interactions, and online shopping experiences.

SMS/text marketing.

Text messaging provides direct, immediate communication with exceptionally high open rates. SMS campaigns can deliver time-sensitive promotions, order updates, appointment reminders, and quick customer service responses. The universal accessibility of text messaging makes it particularly valuable for reaching customers who may not actively use social media or messaging apps.

Beyond dedicated messaging platforms, social media channels offer additional conversational opportunities within environments where customers already spend time.

Social media direct messages.

Social media platforms offer integrated messaging features that allow brands to engage customers within familiar environments. These channels enable multimedia communication while leveraging social proof and community engagement. Direct messages on platforms like Instagram and Facebook provide opportunities for personalized customer service and targeted marketing outreach.

Voice assistants.

Voice-activated software like Amazon Alexa and Apple Siri continues gaining popularity across electronic devices. These assistants offer hands-free interaction opportunities, providing quick answers and directing users to websites or products. Voice technology creates new touchpoints for brand awareness and customer engagement, particularly valuable for accessibility and convenience-focused experiences.

Building on basic voice interaction, more sophisticated systems can provide comprehensive shopping guidance.

Virtual shopping assistants.

Advanced virtual assistants combine AI capabilities with conversational interfaces to guide customers through complex purchasing decisions. These systems can understand context, remember preferences, and provide sophisticated product recommendations while maintaining natural dialogue flows.

Benefits of conversational commerce

Conversational commerce lets you recreate the experience your customers get in a typical brick-and-mortar store. The difference is that they don't have to leave the comforts of home for that to happen. Businesses using AI in customer service report significant savings, reducing costs by 30%, with gains extending far beyond the budget.

Let's examine the specific ways conversational commerce delivers measurable business results.

Reduce cart abandonments.

Proactive chat messages or SMS reminders can effectively re-engage customers who have abandoned their carts. AI chatbots can detect when items remain in a cart and proactively engage customers with reminders or assistance, helping to recover potential lost sales. This automated intervention addresses one of ecommerce's biggest challenges, as abandoned carts represent significant revenue leakage for online businesses.

Beyond recovering lost sales, conversational commerce also helps convert prospects who are still evaluating options.

Close potential leads.

Direct, personalized interactions can address hesitations and provide the necessary information to convert leads. Conversational commerce excels at qualifying prospects through natural dialogue, ensuring sales teams focus on genuinely interested potential customers with specific needs. Average order value increases by 10% when customers live chat before buying, demonstrating how real-time assistance directly impacts purchasing decisions. This approach allows businesses to address customer concerns immediately, provide product recommendations, and guide prospects through complex purchasing decisions with human-like interaction.

Once customers make purchases, conversational channels continue providing value through enhanced support.

Provide support through direct messaging.

Providing support through direct messaging channels improves customer satisfaction by offering immediate, convenient assistance. For example, a customer needing to track an order can simply message the brand's support line and receive real-time updates without navigating a website or waiting on hold. This immediate accessibility transforms customer service from a reactive cost center into a proactive value driver.

These support interactions also create valuable opportunities for gathering customer insights.

Gather feedback.

Conversational channels streamline real-time feedback collection, allowing businesses to enable more actionable customer insights directly from customer interactions. This continuous feedback loop allows businesses to adapt quickly to changing consumer needs, further driving sales growth. Through conversational interactions, companies can collect insights on customer preferences, pain points and behavioral patterns that inform strategic decisions and improve product offerings.

Provide upselling and cross-selling opportunities.

Upselling and cross-selling strategies can give you a chance to double your profits by selling more to customers who are already considering purchasing from you.

Based on conversational context and purchase history, AI can suggest relevant additional products or upgrades. Personalized recommendations leverage customer data and algorithms to provide targeted product suggestions using past purchase history, browsing behavior and contextual information. The conversational format makes these recommendations feel natural and helpful rather than intrusive, as they emerge organically from customer inquiries and demonstrated interests.

Build customer loyalty.

Data consistently shows that companies using chatbots for basic tasks like appointment booking and customer service see increased brand loyalty. They achieve this by delivering higher customer satisfaction, enhanced convenience, proactive engagement, and stronger ongoing relationships. The combination of convenience, personalization, and immediate assistance creates positive brand experiences that foster long-term customer relationships and advocacy.

The role of AI and machine learning in conversational commerce

AI and machine learning are revolutionizing conversational commerce by enabling personalized interactions between brands and customers. Conversational AI, powered by natural language processing and generative AI, allows machine-learning AI chatbots to understand user intent and respond naturally in real time.

AI-powered solutions automate routine inquiries while escalating complex issues to human agents, improving efficiency and satisfaction. Through continuous learning, these systems deliver increasingly relevant responses over time.

Generative AI enhances capabilities by crafting dynamic, contextually rich responses that feel human rather than scripted. Ecommerce platforms now use AI-powered tools to recommend products mid-conversation, re-engage cart abandoners and upsell based on behavior.

As technologies evolve, the focus shifts from automation to delivering emotionally intelligent experiences that foster loyalty and reshape commerce conversations.

Challenges to conversational commerce

Successfully implementing conversation commerce requires proactively addressing key operational challenges. Without proper planning, businesses risk creating fragmented customer experiences, losing the human touch, and facing compliance issues that can undermine the entire initiative.

Data can be siloed. 

As with any multi-department or omnichannel project, siloed data can quickly become a problem if you are not careful.

Consider a customer who decides to message your business on Facebook Messenger or Etsy. The conversation may eventually transition over to SMS text messaging or email. What happens if one channel's data center doesn't translate to another? The customer can easily find themselves having to repeat what they've already said, potentially leading to frustration and a diminished customer experience.

When selecting a conversation commerce tool, ensure that it can integrate with others easily. Even with proper data integration, another significant challenge emerges around maintaining an authentic human connection.

Dehumanizing interactions.

It is often an inevitable side effect of automation tools that the user experience can ultimately feel dehumanizing. To compensate, businesses should make sure their tool can identify key terms effectively and understand phrases that indicate frustration or that the customer would like to speak to an actual human. You can mitigate this by offering a transparent handoff to human agents and personalizing bot interactions with a friendly tone.

Beyond user experience concerns, businesses must also navigate complex regulatory requirements.

Data privacy and consent management.

Collecting user data through chatbots and messaging apps necessitates strict compliance with regulations like GDPR and CCPA. Ecommerce businesses must transparently request consent for data collection during conversations, for example, by providing clear consent banners or opt-in messages at the start of a chat. BigCommerce's open ecosystem supports compliant integrations through privacy-first messaging apps and consent management tools.

While these challenges require careful attention, a systematic approach can help you implement conversational commerce successfully.

How to get started with conversational commerce

Success depends on understanding your specific business context, choosing the right technology partners, and committing to continuous improvement based on real performance data.

Assess your business needs.

Start by identifying the specific challenges your customers and internal teams face daily. Map these pain points to measurable business objectives. If declining conversion rates concern you, focus on reducing cart abandonment through targeted messaging. If customer support delays damage retention, prioritize faster response capabilities that strengthen brand loyalty.

Create a comprehensive list of desired outcomes, then organize them by business impact and implementation feasibility. This prioritization prevents you from attempting too many changes simultaneously, which often leads to execution problems and diluted results.

Once you've clearly defined your objectives, the next step is understanding what solutions and approaches are available.

Do your research.

Before you decide on a specific solution, set your benchmark. Research how other companies in your industry utilize the potential of conversational commerce. Document their approaches, noting which channels they emphasize and how they structure customer interactions.

Evaluate available platforms through hands-on testing. Ask for demos and sign up for free trials to learn about each solution's pros and cons. Pay attention to user experience from both customer and agent perspectives.

Gather direct customer feedback through surveys and interviews. Review existing support tickets and chat logs to identify recurring issues that conversational commerce could address more effectively.

Choose partners and technology strategically.

Identify a partner.

The real challenge isn't just picking the right conversational tool — it's making it work.

Finding a chat solution that plays nicely with your existing systems is important. But here's where most companies stumble: they get the tech set up and then wonder why their customer satisfaction scores aren't budging.

Take live chat, for example. You can't just flip a switch and expect magic. Your team needs to master the art of solving problems through rapid-fire text exchanges. While customers expect responses in about 2 minutes (that's the sweet spot that keeps them from clicking away), your agents are juggling multiple conversations while trying to sound helpful, not robotic.

The bottom line? Look at your current team honestly. Do you have the capacity to train chat specialists? Can someone manage response times and quality without it becoming their full-time obsession?

Sometimes, the more prudent move is admitting you'd rather focus on what you do best, and let a specialized agency handle the conversation management. They've already solved the problems you're about to discover.

Platform integration requirements.

Select platforms that seamlessly connect with your existing business infrastructure, including CRM systems, email marketing tools, inventory management software and analytics platforms. Poor integration creates data silos and workflow inefficiencies that undermine your conversational commerce effectiveness.

Evaluate each potential solution's API capabilities, pre-built integrations and technical support quality. Consider how easily customer data will flow between systems and whether your team can access unified customer profiles during conversations.

Implementation realities.

Technology selection represents only part of the challenge. Your team must develop new skills for managing real-time customer conversations across multiple channels simultaneously. Live chat agents, for instance, need training in rapid problem-solving while maintaining helpful, personalized communication.

Consider your organization's capacity for training specialized staff and managing quality control. As mentioned, customer expectations for response times average around two minutes, requiring dedicated resources and systematic processes.

If internal expertise or bandwidth constraints exist, partnering with experienced agencies can accelerate implementation while allowing your team to focus on core business activities.

With the right partners and technology in place, you're ready to move from planning to execution.

Launch your conversational tool.

Once you have selected your conversational tool, there's one thing left: key performance indicators (KPIs). This could be the number of customer conversations, customer satisfaction, response time, conversation, or retention rates. 

Your KPIs will help you measure your success, give you hints on which of the solutions bring the best results, and tell you which should be reconsidered or improved. When everything is ready, you can start using conversational commerce.

Measure success.

Even if you've tied everything up in a bow, you still need to monitor your performance. Quality, real-time metrics can help you evaluate your performance and improve your conversational activities at every stage of the buyer's journey.

Regularly reviewing analytics and customer feedback is crucial for ongoing optimization and iterating on conversational flows. Optimize through continuous analysis.

Regular performance reviews.

Schedule monthly analytics reviews to identify trends in customer behavior, agent performance, and conversion patterns. Compare results against your established benchmarks and industry standards to uncover valuable context.

Analyze conversation transcripts to identify common customer questions, successful resolution strategies, and friction points in your conversational flows.

Iterative improvement process.

Use customer feedback and performance data to refine your conversational scripts, automated responses, and escalation procedures. Test modifications systematically, measuring their impact on key metrics before implementing broader changes.

Update your technology stack and processes based on evolving customer preferences and new platform capabilities. Conversational commerce continues developing rapidly, making ongoing adaptation essential for sustained success.

Regular optimization ensures your conversational commerce strategy evolves with changing customer expectations while delivering measurable business results.

The final word

Conversational commerce is not merely a trend, it’s a standard in modern retail. Its future outlook includes deeper integration with generative AI, closer ties with social commerce, and ever-increasing user expectations for seamless and personalized interactions. Businesses must prioritize "meeting customers where they are," leveraging these powerful tools to build stronger relationships and drive growth.

FAQs about conversational commerce