Conversational Commerce is gaining ground and becoming the most important trend in e-commerce.

C-commerce allows to support the sales of online stores and reduce the abandonment rate. Meanwhile, the operational expenditure of companies is reduced by a third using the power of social networks.

The current pandemic has drastically changed the places to buy various products, especially in terms of e-commerce. This generated an increase in preference for digital platforms and, in this sense, c-commerce or conversational commerce is the one that has been gaining space to revitalize marketplaces.

But with this paradigm shift comes a question: What is conversational commerce? “It’s basically an interactive commerce, where you sell products and services, assisting the customer through a digital channel, either robotically or with a human agent, or a hybrid of both,” explains the CEO and founder of OneMarketer, Max Celedon, a firm that has been developing solutions through chatbots for more than 200 companies in Latin America and Europe for more than 7 years.

About the differences between e-commerce (electronic commerce) and c-commerce, Celedón explains: “Conversational commerce tries to match the same experience of a physical store, when a salesperson approaches and guides the customer in the purchase. This is a support to e-commerce, because in this modality the consumer is alone in the store”. This increases conversion in marketplaces, since it reduces the abandonment rate of online stores.

There are many examples of c-commerce, such as the use of WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger to contact sellers directly. Facebook Inc. commissioned a study to the prestigious firm Boston Consulting Group to evaluate the reason why people contact companies, which already have their online store, through messages via social networks or chatbots and the results were surprising: 45% of respondents said they contacted because they needed more information about a product or service, while 35% did so because they wanted to receive instant answers to their queries. Finally, 30% did so to have the ability to negotiate prices and offers and another 31% to receive personalized advice.

Tik-Tok even appears as a real possibility to make online purchases in a personalized way. The so-called V-Commerce generates sales through videos where a product is presented, users converse and there is a button to buy it directly. This is enhanced because consumers increasingly choose to buy through cell phones, rather than on the desktop computer.