IN the recent years, conversational commerce – people shopping via chat – has rapidly become mainstream and presents brands with new opportunities to engage shoppers in modern and relevant ways.
Based on a study conducted by Boston Consulting Group (BCG), as people increasingly embrace shopping via chat, conversational commerce is igniting a global movement that is only set to grow.
It is then not surprising that consumers here have increased their ecommerce purchases, especially via social messaging platforms, like WhatsApp Business – with Southeast Asians leading globally when it comes to conversational commerce.
It is said that there are about 175 million people around the world message a WhatsApp Business account every day.
To add value and create a new shopping experience to its users, WhatsApp announced today that it has added the new ‘carts’ feature to the WhatsApp Business App, making shopping on WhatsApp more seamless and intuitive.
In addition, catalogs have allowed people to quickly see what’s available and helped businesses organize their chats around particular items.
“With more and more shopping happening through chats, we want to make buying and selling even easier,” WhatsApp said.
The new ‘carts’ are great when messaging businesses that sell multiple items, like a local retail or e-commerce store.
This feature – built with the small business owner in mind –allows people quickly add goods or services they want from a business’ Catalog, and then send the order as one message to the business.
“This makes it much easier for people to let businesses know what they would like to buy, and for the business to keep track of order inquiries, manage requests from customers and close sales.”
Meanwhile, more than 98% of business establishments in Malaysia are small-to-medium sized businesses (SMBs) which accounts for almost 40% of the nation’s gross domestic product (GDP).
Many of these SMBs have been turning to digital tools like WhatsApp Business to maintain connection and communication with their customers and to ensure ongoing sales.
In fact, a handful of SMBs in Malaysia were selected as part of the global testing group for ‘carts’ and have found it really effective in building a high-touch service experience.
“People don’t need to download a separate app – they can simply chat with businesses through the WhatsApp messenger app that they use every day,” WhatsApp added. – Dec 9, 2020
