Shopify’s latest acquisition will help business market their online stores with messaging apps.
The Canadian e-commerce company recently announced that it will be acquiring Kit CRM, a virtual marketing assistant that uses simple text messaging to assist businesses in accomplishing their marketing needs for their online stores. Businesses that connect Kit to their store can manage their social marketing with this virtual marketing assistant, which works with five online marketplaces. Acquiring Kit will give Shopify a notable conversational commerce opportunity.
This marketing trend could help business owners run their operations with greater effectiveness.
Conversational commerce is a major up-and-coming marking trend. According to Small Business Trends, it primarily pertains to using messaging and chat interfaces to interact with companies, brands, services, etc. that until this point have had no real place in the “bidirectional, asynchronous messaging context.” With the help of this marketing tool, end-users and customers are able to talk to brands via instant messaging applications like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Slack, and others.
The Chief Marketing Officer at Shopify, Craig Miller, commented on the recent acquisition announcement saying that Shopify believes messaging apps are the doorway for the internet on mobile and that conversational commerce represents a massive opportunity for their company.
Conversational commerce could change the way consumers make online purchase decisions.
In addition to acquiring Kit, Shopify has also been busy with developing commerce bots for Facebook Messenger that will enable business owners to have improved interactive and engaging communications directly with their customers.
In recent years, messaging apps have significantly increased in popularity to the point that in some cases they’ve become more popular than social media platforms. With this level of popularity, conversational commerce may end up proving to be a fundamental shift from standard commerce. It may also end up changing the way that consumers make online buying choices and even how they communicate.
“Kit addresses a real pain point for merchants and is one of our most highly rated apps in the Shopify App Store. We look forward to having the Kit team join Shopify and help us define the future of conversational commerce together,” Miller stated.
