Someone wants a waterproof jacket for cycling to work, under €150. They could send a WhatsApp message to the bike shop round the corner and ask whether they have anything like that. They could open the chat window on an online shop and explain what they're after. Or they could ask ChatGPT which jacket would suit them and have it compare a few.
Those are three different purchases, but they have something in common: none of them starts by browsing categories. Each one starts with a conversation. That's conversational commerce.
What conversational commerce is
Conversational commerce is buying and selling through a conversation, whether that's messages, chat, voice or AI assistants, instead of clicking through pages, categories and filters, or alongside it. The shopper explains what they need in their own words, and the answer comes back as questions, advice and products.
The term was popularised by Chris Messina, then at Uber, who predicted in January 2016 that it would be "the year of conversational commerce". He was mostly thinking about messaging apps and bots. Ten years on, the underlying idea still holds, but where it happens and who does the answering have changed a good deal.
Where it happens today
In messaging, with people. This is the oldest and still the most common form: the customer messages on WhatsApp or Instagram and a real person at the shop replies. The WhatsApp Business Platform also lets a shop show its catalogue inside the chat, so the customer can add products to a basket and send the order without leaving the conversation. It works very well as long as there's someone on the other end to reply.
In your own shop. The chat on your website, answered either by a person or by an AI shopping assistant that replies from your catalogue. Here the conversation happens right where the product is: the shopper asks, gets a recommendation and adds the product to the basket without leaving the page.
Outside your shop, in assistants such as ChatGPT. Some people already start a purchase by asking a general-purpose assistant what they should buy. In March 2026, OpenAI expanded the Agentic Commerce Protocol, the standard shops use to share their products with ChatGPT, so the assistant can help people discover them. It also admitted its first built-in checkout wasn't flexible enough, and now lets each shop use its own checkout. Here your products can be part of the conversation, even though you're not the one running it.
What a conversation adds, and what it doesn't
A conversation is especially useful when the shopper knows what they need but not which product solves it. "Something for cycling that keeps the rain out but doesn't make me sweat" is easy to say and hard to turn into filters. That's the difference between finding a product and choosing one, and it's where talking helps most.
For other purchases it adds nothing. Someone who knows the exact model finds it faster with the search box, and someone reordering doesn't need to explain themselves to anyone. Conversational commerce doesn't replace the shop you already know; it adds another way in.
The hard part of doing it well
Each of the three places has its own problem.
Messaging with people doesn't scale. Answering ten customers a day on WhatsApp is manageable; answering a hundred, at night and at weekends, is a different job. And a question that takes hours to answer often ends without a sale.
Shop chat windows got a bad name from bots with pre-written answers that only understood what someone had anticipated. An AI assistant understands far more, but it has to stay tied to your real catalogue: recommending a product the shop doesn't sell, or inventing a feature, is worse than not answering at all.
With third-party assistants such as ChatGPT, the problem is different: you can't see or correct what gets said. What's said about your products will depend largely on the information you've published, which is why a well-described catalogue now matters beyond your own website too.
Where to start
If you run an online shop, you're probably doing conversational commerce already without calling it that: every question you get by email, WhatsApp or social media is a buying conversation. A good starting point is to look at what people ask you, answer the repeated questions on the product pages themselves, and decide where you want to handle those conversations: in your messaging, on your website or both. And for assistants such as ChatGPT, which you don't control, make sure your product pages describe each product properly.
SmartShop AI, a sales assistant for Shopify and WooCommerce stores, covers one of those three places: the conversation inside your own shop, with answers and recommendations drawn from your real catalogue, and the product ready to add to the basket.