Due to the rise of conversational commerce, businesses need to be able to not only chat with customers, but provide a seamless shopping experience that turns the conversation into a sale. In this piece, we explore tools brands can use to remove hurdles to conversion — by simplifying chat-based transactions and streamlining customer orders.

Selling through messaging apps
Brands can use conversational commerce as a new sales channel by incorporating payment automation in Messenger. This business tool is available to brands that have enabled checkout through Commerce Manager and allows them to request and manage payments seamlessly and securely within a Messenger conversation.

To go a step further, businesses that use checkout through Commerce Manager can also use Messenger to mark orders as placed, conversations as paid, and send shipping alerts and updates via automated order updates. This allows both brands and customers to find the order information in one place.

For brands looking for assistance with using Messenger as a sales channel, working with a trusted Facebook Marketing Partner can provide you with valuable insight from an expert. It can help you:

• Sync real-time inventory and organise shopping catalogues
• Integrate flexible, secure payment methods that customers will trust, including cash on delivery and bank transfers

A good example is when skincare brand Kiehl's was building its conversational commerce sales channel. The brand chose to work with a Facebook Marketing Partner, Haravan, to build an automated experience for Messenger and ran an eight-day campaign to promote the new sales channel. By the end of the 2019 campaign, it had successfully increased sales and its return on ad spend.