What Facebook Has Gotten Right and Wrong About Conversational Commerce

At Techcrunch Disrupt SF, David Marcus, Head of Messenger, announced a few new features that will be of particular interest to businesses that transact on the platform. The features?—?enhanced mobile websites inside Messenger and native payments?—?are said to help businesses to offer more a detailed and rich commerce experience in Messenger. I think this rationale is largely true and makes up for the underwhelming rollout of Messenger’s B2C (business to consumer) interactions and their reliance on bots. These new features are a step in the right direction, which means a thoughtful understanding of user behavior (on Facebook and beyond, think WeChat) and appropriate UX & UI (user experience and user interface) for B2C interactions in messaging apps.

Cautious Optimism

While I have some reservations about Facebook’s overall prospects in conversational commerce, I see these new features in Messenger Ver. 1.2 as a positive sign. The initial launch of the Messenger Business Platform at F8 fell flat for so many because overhyped bots weren’t quite ready for primetime and were less useful than the native apps they sought to replace.

Bots, while a potentially promising experience, felt like a solution in search of a problem. Many of the early bot interactions were half-baked, with developers more interested in a new distribution channel outside of the App Store and Google Play. To top it off, much of the hype behind the bot phenomenon was built around an incorrect interpretation of what made WeChat successful in China. A16Z’s Connie Chan lays this out with stark clarity:

Why this wasn’t apparent to developers and Facebook prior to the bots hype cycle is up for debate. (I have some thoughts, but that’s another post entirely) The point is that building the core Messenger B2C experience around bots before they were useful was a mistake and it seems that Facebook is fully aware of it. The enhanced mobile websites within Messenger will allow developers to build more engaging web views directly into messaging threads, allowing users to perform simple actions within the message.

As Connie showed in her tweets, a mobile web view is the best UI for most B2C messaging because of the dynamic actions that users can take. Text-based B2C messaging is too constraining for most B2C transactions, whether it’s a human or brand bot on the other end. Web views take advantage of the context provided by message apps?—?ID, payment credentials, messaging history?—?in a way that provides a more satisfying and useful user exeprience

Show Me the Money

During his interview with Josh Constine, David Marcus announced that Messenger is launching native payments in a closed beta. This is significant for Messenger’s commerce initiatives. Until now, all payments initiated in a Messenger thread were pushed to a business’s mobile web site to finish the transaction. Finishing the payment process outside of Messenger thread causes 2 issues:

• 1. Added friction to checkout, reducing sales conversions and removing businesses’ incentinve to transact on Messenger, and
• 2. Reduced Facebook’s ability to track user purchasing data, limiting their ability to optimize transaction flow and enhance the user experience.

Bringing payments in-thread will solve both of those issues for Facebook.

In my post Facebook, Commerce and Trust Issues, I made the case for Facebook to partner with a trusted payments company, specifically PayPal/Venmo, instead of building payments internally:

“When building new products for consumers, it helps to leverage brand relationships that consumers already have and to later change consumer behavior over time.

Consumers don’t associate commerce with Facebook other than the ads and brand content that they see and that’s a neutral association at best and negative/nefarious at worst. That’s not even considering the reaction of publishers, advertisers, brands and other partners to Facebook owning the entire Commerce Stack.”

Facebook’s partnerships with PayPal, Visa, MasterCard, American Express and Stripe to do back-end payments processing is a significant enhancement for Messenger, users, and businesses. Facebook can now focus on optimizing the Messenger front-end experience by leveraging checkout-friendly mobile payments like PayPal’s OneTouch, Visa Checkout, MasterCard’s MasterPass and the most important of all, Pay with Venmo (via the PayPal partnership). These payments companies clearly partnered with Messenger in hopes of using it to increase adoption of their mobile payments products among Messenger’s 1 Billion users. This is a win for both Facebook and the payments players.

What’s Next for Messenger?

As Marcus mentioned in the interview, Messenger will continue to invest in its bot platform, shoring up its commerce deficiencies as it continues to improve their interactions with users. Facebook will more than likely continue to build out app-in-app experiences (via web views) in Messenger, putting it in direct competition with Apple’s upcoming iMessage apps. Reading between the lines, Facebook is serious about developing Messenger into its own OS (with both web and app experiences), sitting atop iOs and Android. The announcement of enhanced mobile websites and native payments in Messenger is a great step in that direction.

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