The Rise of Conversational Commerce

The phrase “conversational commerce” was coined in January 2016, when former Uber developer experience lead Chris Messina published a Medium post arguing that messaging apps, not standalone shopping apps, would become the place where people bought things. At the time it read as a bold bet. By 2022, it looked more like a description of what had already happened.

Where it started

The groundwork was laid earlier than most people remember. Facebook opened its Messenger Platform to developers at its F8 conference in April 2016, letting brands build bots that could answer questions, take orders and send receipts without a customer ever leaving the chat thread. Domino’s had already been experimenting with order-by-tweet and order-by-emoji systems, and within a year Sephora, 1-800-Flowers and dozens of other retailers had launched their own Messenger bots for browsing and checkout.

China got there first, and further. WeChat had been folding payments, customer service, group buying and storefronts into a single chat app since the early 2010s, and its “mini programs” launched in 2017 turned individual chat threads into functioning shopfronts. Western platforms spent the next several years trying to catch up to a model Chinese consumers already took for granted.

What pushed it into the mainstream

Two forces did more than any product launch to normalize buying through chat. The first was smartphone habits: by the mid-2010s, people were already spending more time in messaging apps than in social feeds, so meeting them there was less a leap than an obvious next step. The second was the pandemic. When physical stores closed in 2020, small businesses that had never touched a bot builder started fielding orders through Instagram DMs and WhatsApp, often manually, because it was the fastest way to keep selling with no storefront and no developer budget.

Meta noticed. Through 2021 and into 2022 it pushed hard on WhatsApp Business catalogs, click-to-WhatsApp ad units and Instagram checkout, betting that the informal DM-selling habit millions of small merchants had adopted out of necessity could become a formal ad product. In markets like India and Brazil, where WhatsApp usage is near-universal, that bet largely paid off.

Where things stood by 2022

By 2022, conversational commerce had split into two tracks that businesses could use. The first was structured: WhatsApp Business catalogs, Messenger’s shopping tools and chat-based customer service platforms like Intercom and Drift, all built to formalize what had been ad hoc. The second stayed informal by design: a customer messaging a boutique’s Instagram account to ask about sizing before buying, still handled by a person typing back, just faster and more expected than it would have been five years earlier.

For a small or midsize business, the practical takeaway wasn’t that every company needed a chatbot. It was that customers increasingly expected to be able to ask a question and buy without switching apps, filling out a contact form or waiting for a callback. Businesses that made that possible, even with something as simple as a fast-responding Instagram inbox, captured sales that would otherwise have gone cold while a customer looked for a faster answer elsewhere.

The lasting lesson

What makes 2022 a useful marker isn’t a single product launch, it’s that conversational commerce stopped being a novelty pitched by platforms and became infrastructure that ordinary businesses relied on daily. The tools kept changing after that, but the underlying shift, treating a chat thread as a real sales channel instead of a support afterthought, held.

More from this period: browse other Marketing Strategy guides or see everything published in 2022.