Conversational Commerce Flows

Run the math on a Nigerian boutique selling ₦5M a month through Instagram DMs. The owner or a junior staff member is in the inbox six to eight hours a day. Each enquiry takes three to fifteen messages to close. Order details get captured in notebooks, screenshots and WhatsApp threads. Payments are confirmed by manual screenshot inspection. Delivery instructions live nowhere coherent. A meaningful percentage of would-be orders drop because the response was too slow, the question was answered ambiguously, or the payment friction was too high.

Conversational commerce flows formalise the journey. A chatbot handles the first three to five repeatable questions ("price?", "in stock?", "delivery cost to Surulere?"). When the conversation reaches a point where human judgement is needed, it escalates with full context. A payment link is generated automatically from the chosen item. Order details, payment confirmation and delivery instructions land in your spreadsheet or Airtable in one structured row. The shift in revenue capacity for the same headcount is substantial.

Bad chatbots refuse to hand over. They keep trying to answer questions they cannot answer, and customers get frustrated and leave. Good chatbots know their limits. We design escalation triggers - keywords, sentiment shifts, complex requests, repeated rephrasing - that route to a human within seconds. The human picks up the full conversation history and continues naturally. Customers often do not realise they have been handed over because the transition is seamless. That is the design we build.

DM-to-order flows work brilliantly up to a volume threshold. Past roughly fifty orders per day, the cognitive load on your sales team - even with chatbot assistance - starts to erode quality. At that point most brands graduate to a proper ecommerce store with WhatsApp as the conversational layer for nuanced enquiries, complaints and high-value orders. We help you recognise when you have hit that threshold, scope the store build, and migrate the conversational logic from the chatbot to the post-purchase WhatsApp experience. The progression is natural - DM to order, then store with WhatsApp support - and we plan engagements with that arc in mind.