Conversational Commerce in Practice: The Four Pieces a Chat Sale Needs

Most businesses already sell in conversations. A customer messages on Instagram and asks about a product, and the business answers. A few messages later the business sends a link to its website, and the customer has to start again somewhere else.

Conversational commerce is when the customer chooses, pays and gets delivery updates in the same chat they started in. This piece covers the four parts that make that work, what each one does, and what goes wrong when one is missing.

Why the website step costs you orders

A customer three messages into a conversation with you is ready to buy. Send them to a product page and they have to find the item again, pick the size again, perhaps create an account, type an address and then see a delivery charge for the first time. Some finish. Many do not.

The Baymard Institute keeps a running average of published cart abandonment studies, and its survey of shoppers’ reasons shows where checkouts lose people.

Source: Baymard Institute, cart abandonment rate statistics, updated 22 September 2025. Reasons exclude shoppers who were only browsing.

The 70.22% figure is a mean across many studies and store types, and it includes shoppers who were only comparing prices. Do not read it as a benchmark for your shop. The reasons are the useful part. In a chat sale the customer is told the total, including delivery, before they pay, and there is no account to create.

Piece one: something to choose from

The conversation needs to read a catalogue. A PDF or a screenshot of a price list will not do. It needs structured data with names, prices, variants and stock.

There are three reasonable versions, from least to most effort.

• A Google Sheet. One tab for products, one for orders. It needs no store subscription and suits a seller whose current catalogue is a photo album on WhatsApp. It is not an order management system, and sellers grow from it into a real store.
• A Meta or Instagram catalogue. If you already sell on Instagram, your products are already there, attached to the channel the customer is using.
• A store. Shopify or WordPress. The conversation can read live stock, variant prices and your shipping rates, and the order lands in the system you already run your business from.

A common failure is a catalogue the conversation cannot see. A tool that answers from your website’s text can describe a product. It cannot say whether the medium is in stock, because stock is not written on the page. See retrieval-augmented generation for why those are different problems.

Piece two: a way to pay

The customer has chosen. Now they need to pay without leaving the chat. That is a payment link: a checkout for this one order, sent into the conversation.

Three things matter in how it is set up. Ask any vendor about each.

Who holds the money. Payment should settle into your own account with your own payment provider. AeroChat never sees card numbers and never holds your funds. Money settles directly into your Airwallex balance.

How payment is confirmed. You cannot pack an order because the customer says “paid already”. Confirmation has to reach your systems. Every payment gets confirmed twice: once the moment Airwallex’s webhook fires, and again when the customer lands on the confirmation page.

What happens after payment. A paid link should create the order and tell someone to pack it. If it does neither, you have moved the admin work, and someone still has to do it by hand.

Payment links work on your website chat, WhatsApp, Messenger, Instagram, Telegram and email.

Piece three: a way to get it there

Many discussions of conversational commerce skip delivery, yet it decides whether the customer buys from you again.

They have paid inside a chat. Within a day the next question arrives in the same chat: when is it coming? If answering means someone opens a courier dashboard, copies a tracking number and pastes it back, the sale is automated and everything after it is manual. Order-status questions are the most repetitive messages most sellers get, and each chat sale produces more of them. See WISMO.

So delivery has to be part of the same system. AeroChat books delivery with your courier through its API. Depending on the courier, it can track a parcel, create a shipment and label, book, reschedule or cancel a pickup, and quote a rate. Delivery updates go to the shopper on the channel they used. AeroChat connects to the payment provider and to the courier separately. Neither goes through the other.

Piece four: the workflow that runs it

The catalogue, the payment provider and the courier do nothing on their own. Something has to read what the customer wrote, work out what they want, check the catalogue, send the right link, record the payment, book the delivery and answer the follow-up.

This is the piece most businesses are missing, which is why the other three sit idle. A business can have a Shopify store, a payment account and a courier account and still be copying prices into Instagram by hand at 11pm.

What it has to do, concretely:

1. Understand messages as customers write them: short, unpunctuated, often mixing two languages in one sentence.
2. Read your live orders, stock and prices.
3. Carry out the action in the real system, such as creating the order or booking the pickup.
4. Stay inside the limits you set on refunds, discounts and delivery promises.
5. Hand over to a person when it should, with the conversation and order details attached.

In AeroChat you set this up by describing the workflow in your own words. There is no flow builder to learn and no code. The limits you set on refunds, discounts and promises are applied by AeroChat itself, not left to the AI’s judgment.

How to tell which piece you are missing

Take twenty recent conversations that did not end in an order. For each one, find the last message before the customer went quiet, and note which piece failed.

Watch the last row closely. Customers who message a business expect a reply within the hour, and a slow answer often loses the sale. Many of the orders a small seller loses go quiet between closing time and the next morning.

How common is buying in chat?

In Southeast Asia, buying in a chat was common before the current AI tools existed. Customers in many markets also say they prefer to message a business.

Sources: Facebook and BCG, 2019, via Marketing-Interactive. Meta, State of Business Messaging, 2026. Juniper Research via Business Wire, 30 October 2023. Meta, which owned Facebook in 2019 as well, sells business messaging.

The 2019 study is old and no recent public figure isolates chat purchases by country in the region. You may also see a “US$290 billion by 2025” figure. That was Juniper’s 2021 forecast, covered a much wider scope, and has been replaced by the 2023 forecast above.

What to do with this

Run the twenty-conversation check above before you buy anything. It takes about an hour and shows which of the four pieces to fix first. Many businesses find they already have a catalogue, a payment account and a courier, and are missing only the workflow that connects them.

Read next

• Conversational commerce (definition)
• Payment link
• Cart abandonment
• How a chat sale completes, step by step
• How a small seller starts, with a Google Sheet
• Get paid without leaving the conversation

Related guides

• Automate Discount Codes in Chat
• Automate Promo Broadcasts in Chat
• WhatsApp promo broadcast templates

Connect the pieces you already have

If your twenty-conversation check points to the workflow, AeroChat connects your catalogue, Airwallex payment links and your courier to WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger. Describe how a sale should run and test it on your own customers’ messages.

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On Shopify? Install AeroChat from the Shopify App Store.