With conversational commerce taking shape in India, Meesho is gearing up to launch its full-fledged and tailored conversational platform for 200 million consumers in the country. The home-grown e-commerce platform is running a pilot project with WhatsApp. Globally, the conversational commerce market is about $41 billion and is marching strongly towards $ 300 billion by 2025.
Recently, Jio Mart collaborated with WhatsApp to provide an end-to-end shopping experience for Indian consumers. Communication Platform-as-a-Service (CPaaS) companies are heavily leveraging on the popularity of messaging platforms like WhatsApp, Apple Business Chat, Messenger, Telegram, WeChat, Viber, KakaoTalk and LINE among others.
In China, Tencent’s WeChat app has made people dependent on their services, from listing of businesses to shopping, WeChat records over 100 million transactions daily. A Study by Forrester for Google found 68% of shoppers prefer brands which offer convenient communications like chat.
Meesho plans to provide tailored shopping experience to consumers with curated product suggestions during festivals and major events. It will enable the customer to choose products based on suggestions on WhatsApp rather going to website or the app. A consumer can purchase the product while indulging in an immersive and conversational experience on WhatsApp.
Confirming the development, Nilesh Gupta, Senior Director of Growth at Meesho said, “We are in the pilot stage along with WhatsApp, and I think a lot of other players are in the ecosystem. So, we are in that journey.”
Elaborating further, Gupta said, “We've been, in fact, for a long time using WhatsApp as a channel of communication. We have been doing certain pilots wherein, we can enable end-to-end leg shopping experience for our customers. Over 600 million people are familiar with WhatsApp and it can be a big use case for us to unlock 200 million audience in the country.”