Conversational Commerce
Shopping that happens through a back-and-forth chat or voice conversation instead of browsing pages and filters.
What is Conversational Commerce?
Conversational commerce is shopping that happens through an ongoing chat or voice conversation rather than clicking through search results, filters, and category pages. For example, asking a chatbot "I need a gift for my dad who likes fishing, under $50" and refining the suggestions through follow-up messages, instead of typing search terms and scrolling a results page. It has existed for years in customer-service chatbots and messaging-app storefronts, but AI chat and voice assistants have made the conversation itself a primary way to discover and narrow down products.
Why it matters
Salesforce defines conversational commerce as the use of messaging apps, chatbots, and voice assistants to make customer interactions and transactions smoother and more personalized, and traces its retail roots to platforms like WeChat and Facebook Messenger storefronts in the mid-2010s, well before generative AI. What's changed since 2023–2024 is that large language models let the conversation itself understand nuance, ask clarifying questions, and hold context across turns, rather than following a rigid decision tree of scripted replies. This has pulled conversational commerce into general-purpose AI chat products (ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity) and voice assistants (Alexa+) rather than confining it to retailer-specific bots, blurring the line between conversational commerce and the broader category of AI shopping.