Blueprint and their conversational commerce platform making shopping easy
by Startacus Admin
Blueprint, the retailtech startup that's got "Conversational Ecommerce" at its core...
If you go into a shop and talk to the staff about your needs, the chances are they will recommend a product to you, tell you why, and then upon your agreement, they will go and get it for you. It’s a simple part of shopping that uses our natural capacity for communication, and it is something that as a general
rule online shopping removes entirely. There is no one to talk to, no one to give advice, no one to go and take the thing off the shelf so you don’t wear out your little legs. At best, the online outlets may employ a live chat feature so that you can speak to someone, but when was the last time you could tell a chatbot or customer support agent “I’ll take it” and sit back while the rest was taken care of?
That is what the concept of ‘conversational commerce’ is all about - combining communication and commerce to make buying, inquiring, reviewing, order-checking, etc. simpler, more intuitive, and more natural.
London-based startup Blueprint has built a platform to take on this challenge of bringing a more natural and simplistic communication-based approach to commerce.
Blueprint uses a combination of customer support agents, machine learning, and natural language processing in order to allow customers to make purchases with simple messaging, be it via SMS or WhatsApp. In this way, purchasing from your favourite retailer can become as simple as texting your partner to remind them to bring home milk.
And because conversation with customer support is rolled into the same platform, it brings back that concept of having something recommended to you and being able to say “I’ll take it” and not then having to go searching for it in the store, add it to your basket, and go through checkout.
In April, Blueprint announced that it had raised €1.1m in a seed round led by Magnus Rausing’s MAHR Projects. This funding is going towards accelerating the development of the platform and to help them disrupt the retail process sooner.
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Published on: 9th May 2020
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