What is conversational commerce?

Conversational commerce is selling inside a messaging conversation instead of on a website or app. The customer discovers products, asks questions, places an order, and pays without ever leaving the chat thread. The term was coined by Chris Messina in 2015; what changed since is that messaging apps added catalogs, payments, and business APIs, so the whole transaction can now finish in one place.

How is it different from ordinary e-commerce?

Ordinary e-commerce is a one-way funnel: the customer lands on a page, navigates a menu, fills a cart, and completes a checkout form. Every step is a place to drop out. Conversational commerce replaces the funnel with a dialogue: the customer can ask "do you have anything without nuts?" and get an answer, which a static product page cannot do.

The practical difference is who does the work. On a website, the customer navigates. In a conversation, the seller, or software acting for the seller, does the navigating on the customer's behalf.

Why does it matter in Egypt and the Gulf specifically?

Because the messaging habit is already there. WhatsApp is the default channel for contacting a business across much of the region, and a large share of restaurant orders already arrive as free-text messages that someone reads and retypes into a POS. Conversational commerce isn't a new behaviour to teach here. It's the existing behaviour, with the manual work taken out.

What does a business need to do it?

• A messaging channel customers already use. In this region, that is overwhelmingly WhatsApp.
• A structured catalog or menu, so items, prices, and options can be presented and selected rather than described in prose.
• A payment method that works inside or immediately alongside the chat, including cash on delivery.
• Someone or something to answer. This is the part that decides whether it scales.

Where it stops working

Conversational commerce is a poor fit for catalogs with thousands of SKUs and heavy filtering: a customer comparing forty items wants a grid, not a thread. It suits repeat, considered-but-small purchases: food, pharmacy, groceries, bookings. If your customers need to compare extensively before buying, a website still does that better.

Redood is a conversational commerce platform for WhatsApp, built for restaurants and retailers in Egypt and the wider Middle East.