Scaling Conversational Commerce

Our team at Shopify has been working on "conversational commerce" for about year now. On Oct 5th, we launched the ability for hundreds of thousands of Shopify merchants to get their products into chat threads and sell directly to their customers through Facebook Messenger. While we were thrilled to get some awesome press coverage, a part of the story that many got wrong was that Shopify had built a bot. In the experience you see above, there's no natural language processing, AI, or even character in the responses. We did something subtly different, but powerful: we simply enabled a merchant's product catalogue to exist richly inside of Messenger, and then we got out of the way. As much as we love the innovation happening in the conversational commerce space, our opinion today is that bots are not the right medium to drive it forward.