Walmart announced that it’s acquiring conversational commerce platform Botmock for an undisclosed sum. The company provides tools for businesses to create their own chat-based customer service and transactional functions. This is meant to democratize an otherwise advanced process.
As background before jumping into the acquisition details, Conversational commerce refers to customer interactions that are activated through voice and messaging. These are increasingly popular ways for consumers to contact businesses and transact, especially messaging-forward Millenials and Gen-Z.
This opportunity is further validated by tech giants that continue to invest in messaging platforms for business. The poster child here is Facebook (ahem, Meta), which continues to position Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp as conversational commerce utilities, as it outlined at Localogy Place.
Place Rewind: Facebook Drives Towards ‘Conversational Business’
Steady Flow
With that backdrop, what’s Walmart’s latest foray into conversational commerce all about? For one, it follows a steady flow of acquisitions, eCommerce partnerships, and feature rollouts from Walmart. Reacting to Covid-era eCommerce inflections, Walmart is all in on digital transformation.
In the conversational commerce realm, it has launched “Walmart Text to Shop”, which lets consumers text to make purchases. It also partnered with Google in 2019 for voice-enabled grocery shopping. And it offers voice-based shopping through both Google and Siri, including check-in for curbside pickup.
The Botmock acquisition now advances Walmart’s overall conversational commerce play. It will allow it to create chat-based customer interactions that are easier to build and smoother on the front end. This will help it to retain customers (lifetime value) and potentially boost basket sizes (revenue per user).
As noted above, Botmock’s claim to fame is democratizing an otherwise programming-intensive process of engineering conversational commerce flows. This involves lots of machine learning magic to steer customers towards intended actions in a natural and consumer-friendly way.
The Botmock workflow is also user-friendly, sidestepping the need for advanced developers. This includes a drag-and-drop editor for designing a chat or voice conversation flow. Users can do so in plain-language and object-oriented ways, which are automatically translated to code on the back end.
These chat-based experiences can then be output to common text and voice platforms including Apple Business Chat, WhatsApp, SMS, Messenger, Microsoft Office Teams, Slack, Alexa or Google Assistant. This means companies don’t have to reinvent the wheel nor burn fuel on homegrown software.
Retail-as-a-Service
Speculating a bit, Botmark could also align with Walmart’s retail-as-a-service (RaaS) play. Like Amazon, it’s chasing revenue as a retail-tech enablement platform, including capabilities for third party retailers like eCommerce and delivery. Conversational commerce could join that RaaS suite.
The idea behind RaaS for players like Walmart and Amazon is to carve out new areas of growth and revenue diversification. They’ve invested heavily in retail tech to optimize their own operations… now they want to squeeze more value out of those investments by spinning them out (the AWS playbook).
And the real opportunity with RaaS is the long-tail SMB segment. Indeed, SMBs are most in need of digital transformation, while also being less capable than larger brands to execute. The democratization of advanced retail tech that RaaS brings will be analogous to the broader SMB Saas movement.
Meanwhile, there’s still ample room for both RaaS and conversational commerce to grow, given that so many retailers aren’t yet enabled. This could equal ample investment and innovation in these areas as we roll into a Post-Covid world… where Covid-era digital shopping behaviors sustain.
