Yoco, an African fintech company has released an article about chat commerce and how its Yoco link can help empower small businesses.
First things first: what is chat commerce anyway and why should I care?
Chat commerce is a recently coined term that’s been bandied about a lot lately – mainly by marketers who enjoy a good buzzword more than the average human. While there’s no formal definition as yet, chat commerce is basically any sort of commerce that takes place within the chat feature of an app. It can be as informal as a small business selling something via their Instagram DMs, or, a formal channel (like WhatsApp, for example) adopted by big brands as a way to upsell their customers and scale their customer service. If you’ve ever conducted a sale over DMs, you’ve actively participated in chat commerce. And if you haven’t, there’s no time like the present. All you need is Yoco Link, a mobile phone, and TADA – you’re in business.
Before we get into using Yoco Link to accept payments over chat, let’s explore why we’re so amped about chat commerce, and why you should be, too:
Chat commerce is such a powerful way of conducting business due to the fact that it meets your customers where they’re already spending their time: on chat and social media apps. By conducting a sale in a place (albeit a virtual one) that they’re intimately familiar with, your customers are already at ease. After all, it’s here where they send memes to their friends, remind their spouses to pick up milk on the way home, and spend way too much time recreating viral dances on a certain app that rhymes with clip clop.
Chat commerce enables you to capitalise on impulse buys
You know the drill – it’s 11:23 pm and you should already be frolicking in dreamland, but you’ve fallen down the endless scroll. And then you see it: a hard-to-believe-it’s-not-a-scam bargain and before you can say “Do I really need a banana bed for my cat?”, you’re the proud owner of a fruit-shaped plush nest for Whiskers. (I wish I wasn’t making this up.) In the cold, hard light of day, you’d probably think twice about spending money on an overpriced novelty item. But because you were able to pay as soon as you expressed interest, you did.
A frictionless ‘checkout’ process means higher conversion rates
Your customers don’t have to download an app or navigate away to your website to pay – barriers that often lead to abandoned baskets. According to the Banyard Institute, a massive 68.8% of would-be shoppers abandon their cart before purchasing. That’s two out of every three shoppers. Yikes. In fact, a convoluted checkout process is one of the main reasons why customers drop off; it’s simply too much effort. And in a world where convenience and ever-shortening attention spans call the shots, you need to make the buying process quick and easy – and chat commerce does just that.
Chat commerce simplifies transacting for you and your customers
The back and forth that often accompanies an online order – especially if you don’t have an online store — can not only eat into your time but put a customer off their purchase entirely. If you ask someone to do an EFT or give you cash on delivery, you’re risking the success of a sale. Be it forgetfulness or plain old flakiness, many a small business owner has had to deal with the annoying ramifications of “I’m so sorry, I clean forgot!”. Chasing after payments isn’t just irritating, it’s detrimental to a healthy cash flow too. Conducting a sale within one channel, by giving your customers a way to pay instantly, eliminates this. Cool, hey?
Say ‘bye to admin, thanks to automatic sales tracking in the Yoco App
Admin is unavoidable #facts. But — and it’s a big but — the amount of admin you need to deal with is directly related to how you conduct your business. By accepting payments in one place (i.e., a chat), you vastly cut down on sales-related admin. What’s more, you have all the details you need, handily saved in your Yoco App, which means that you don’t need to spend time consolidating your books. Nice.
Chat commerce is an easy way to tap into an additional stream of revenue
Whether you’re an old-school brick-and-mortar trader, market vendor, on-site service renderer, or operate solely online, adding chat commerce to your small business toolkit lets you tap into a whole new customer base. Importantly, it means you never have to miss out on a sale.
