Text-to-Buy makes turning shoppers into buyers as easy as sending them a message. It’s also the natural evolution of conversational commerce.

Brands are facing a litany of challenges unparalleled in the modern era: high inflation, Apple privacy changes, supply chain delays, skyrocketing shipping costs, and consumers returning to shopping in stores.

Every part of the funnel is getting harder for merchants:

• Acquiring new customers is more expensive. Gone are the goldrush days of cheap customer acquisition with consumers stuck shopping from home. Privacy has come to the forefront, and consumers are living their lives again, making targeting new customers much harder.  
• Traditional marketing channels aren’t as effective as they used to be. From our data and research across 5,000 merchants and hundreds of millions of consumers, we’re seeing that customer lifetime value is shrinking, and consumers are becoming immune to traditional marketing channels. Customers want high-value, personalized marketing. Making sure you have explicit opt-in and moving to real-time channels like SMS are countering these general trends. Research from CommerceNext found that 61% of retailers see rising CACs as one of their biggest challenges this year—LTV:CAC ratio is now becoming a primary indicator of the health of a business. And 81% are either already using SMS to gather first-party data, or are planning to launch an SMS program.
• There’s friction in the checkout process. Consumers are increasingly browsing on their mobile devices, but they’re not purchasing at the same rate as they are when they’re on their desktop. In fact, mobile conversion rates are more than 60% lower than on desktop. Why? Because most online checkouts are cumbersome and time consuming.

Having worked in the payments space for over a decade—including as CEO of Venmo—I’ve helped hundreds of businesses improve their commerce experiences. SMS is a tool to bridge the gap between just browsing and buying. 

Today, we’re that much closer to empowering brands to leverage a better mechanism for not only starting conversations directly with top customers via SMS, but actually turning shopping carts into completed purchases with Text-to-Buy powered by Shop Pay.

This new product lets brands offer their SMS subscribers a seamless mobile checkout experience. Subscribers can place an order by simply replying with a keyword—and pay for it via text message.

Learn more about Text-to-Buy, and join the waitlist.

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Text-to-Buy is the evolution of conversational commerce

The story of Attentive is the story of reinventing business to consumer communication and commerce. It’s the story of developing the sort of relationship with your customers that keeps them coming back to your brand over and over again—increasing lifetime value. And with the introduction of Text-to-Buy, it’s the story of making sure that when they’re ready to buy (for the first time or again), you’re giving them a simplified experience. 

Our recent survey of 5,000 consumers revealed that 76.6% ranked convenience/ease of payment as one of their top three determinants when making an online purchase. Meanwhile, over 63% have clicked on a link in a brand’s text message to purchase something within the last 3 months. 

Imagine receiving a targeted message based on your preferences and texting “yes” or “buy” to purchase the item. No shipping address, credit card info, or managing multiple logins or passwords. That’s the beauty of payments via SMS. 

We’ve been on a long journey in commerce: starting with the evolution from blanket marketing to anyone who will listen, to contextual commerce that uses consumer data and attributes to build more customized experiences, to true conversational commerce, allowing for personalized, human interaction (through Attentive Concierge™). And now, we’re closing the gap by enabling purchases directly through text. This is exactly what we had in mind when we started exploring payments and developed Text-to-Buy with Shop Pay. 

The last decade (not to mention, the last 2+ years) has pushed brands to be more nimble than ever before. But as consumers became more discerning and regulations became more consumer-oriented, marketers have had to evolve rapidly.  

Marketing is the pathway to increasing sales by finding, converting, and retaining customers. I’ve never been more excited about the potential for brands to meet and exceed consumer expectations—and to turn those shoppers into repeat purchasers.