Shopify Acquisition of Kit CRM Introduces Conversational Commerce


shopify Kit CRM conversational commerce

Shopify has just recently announced that it is all set to acquire Kit CRM, a virtual marketing assistant that leverages messaging to help businesses market their online stores. The acquisition of Kit CRM will will add yet another feather in the crown of conversational commerce.

“We believe messaging apps are the gateway for the Internet on mobile, and conversational commerce represents a huge opportunity for Shopify. 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.” said Craig Miller, Chief Marketing Officer at Shopify.

Conversational commerce is paving the way for messaging and chat interfaces to help business owners run their business more effectively.

Shopify is the leading cloud-based multi-channel commerce platform designed for small and medium-sized businesses. Business owners use this software to design, set up and manage their stores across multiple sales channels, including web and mobile, social media and online and offline marketplaces. The platform also provides business owners with a powerful back office and single view of their business.

What Is Kit CRM?

Conversational commerce is one of the major emerging trends in marketing which largely pertains to utilizing chat and messaging interfaces to interact with brands, services, Companies etc. that hitherto have had no real place in the bidirectional, asynchronous messaging context. With the help of conversational commerce, end-users and customers are now able to talk to brands through instant messaging applications such as Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Telegram, Slack, among others.

Additionally, Shopify is also lately involved in building commerce bots for Facebook Messenger that will allow business owners to have more interactive and engaging conversations with customers directly.

Over the last couple of years, messaging apps have seen a phenomenal growth in popularity and have also started to outpace social media platforms in some cases. Keeping its popularity in mind, conversational commerce may prove to be not only a fundamental shift from traditional commerce, but is also change the way consumers communicate and make purchase decisions online.

Image: Kit Facebook

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Jonha Richman Jonha Richman is a Staff Writer for Small Business Trends covering apps, ecommerce and new business models. Jonha invests through her private investment fund, JJ Richman. The firm's latest investments have been focused on real estate, equities, bonds, commodities, emerging technologies (such as AI, big data) and various other globally diversified assets.

One Reaction
  1. It’s cool that Shopify can see adoption rates and how customers are using plugins and then decide which ones to acquire and “double down” on. This sounds quite fascinating because it humanized the brand but I don’t like that last part about bots. Automating customer interactions like that is very risky.