Most coverage of conversational commerce assumes the conversation happens on WhatsApp.
In Bangkok, it doesn’t. Your buyer is on LINE.
In Manila, she’s on Viber. In Ho Chi Minh City, he’s on Zalo. WhatsApp is one channel of several, not the headline act.
The global conversational commerce market hit $14.9 billion in 2024 and is projected to reach $63.4 billion by 2034. Asia-Pacific accounted for 38.91% of global revenue in 2025, the fastest-growing region for chat-driven sales.
Winning that growth means meeting customers on the channels they already use, country by country. Here’s how to run conversational commerce across the SEA messaging map.
What Conversational Commerce Looks Like Across SEA
Conversational commerce is e-commerce that happens inside messaging channels. Instead of bouncing the customer to a website or app to complete a purchase, the entire journey from product discovery to payment lives inside a chat thread.
What changes country by country is which thread the customer is already in.
- Thailand runs on LINE
- The Philippines runs on Viber
- Vietnam runs on Zalo
- Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore lean on WhatsApp
Across all of them, SMS is the universal fallback for one-time codes and notifications.
66% of consumers say they’re ready to complete purchases directly through chat. The demand exists; the question is whether your stack can serve it on the right channel for each market.
Read More: How to Orchestrate SMS, WhatsApp, and Video Like a Pro: No-Fluff Best Practices That Scale
LINE in Thailand: Official Accounts and In-Chat Checkout
Thai retailers treat LINE Official Account as their primary marketing list – not a side channel. LINE OA broadcasts achieve read rates of 80–90%, well above email’s 10–15%. For brands in Thailand, LINE isn’t where you supplement your marketing. It’s where your marketing lives.
The retailer toolkit on LINE has three main parts. The Rich Menu sits at the bottom of the chat with up to six tappable buttons, replacing a website menu and putting catalog, store locator, or live chat one tap away.
LINE MyShop turns the OA into an in-chat storefront. Retailers upload products, manage stock and orders, issue invoices, and accept LINE Pay without sending the customer anywhere else.
In-chat checkout eliminates the redirect – the single biggest drop-off point in mobile commerce. When a customer can browse, select, and pay without ever leaving the LINE thread, cart abandonment drops significantly.
LINE Pay closes the loop. Customers link a card or bank once, then pay with a PIN or biometrics inside the chat.
Bangkok retailers use this for flash-sale broadcasts: a tagged segment receives a Rich Message at 10 am local, taps the product card, pays via LINE Pay, and the order is confirmed before they finish their morning coffee.
Read More: Promotions on LINE: How to Turn Flash Sales into One-Tap Purchases
Viber in the Philippines: Verified Business Messaging at Scale
Viber is the trusted messaging app for Filipino retail. Rakuten Viber reported a 65% year-on-year increase in new business accounts in 2025 and 53% growth in delivered business messages, driven mostly by MSMEs in ecommerce, beauty, and food.
What makes Viber work for commerce in the Philippines is verification. A verified Viber Business profile gets a blue tick, a logo, and a public searchable listing.
Retailers can publish a product catalog of up to 50 items inside the business profile, send rich-media broadcasts with carousels and CTA buttons, and run 1-to-1 sales chats from a Business Inbox that keeps business conversations separate from personal ones.
The same channel doubles as the OTP pipe for secure logins, with one-tap copy reducing checkout abandonment that SMS OTPs sometimes cause.
Picture a Filipino beauty brand broadcasting a Viber carousel on a Saturday evening. A customer sees a limited-edition lipstick, taps the CTA, verifies her identity with a Viber OTP, and completes the purchase inside the app – in under 90 seconds. No redirect. No abandoned cart. One verified, branded interaction from discovery to payment.
Read More: Driving Retail Engagement Through Targeted Viber Campaigns
Zalo in Vietnam: Official Account, ZNS, and Zalo Pay
Zalo has 74.7 million active users in Vietnam and an 87% usage rate, making it the only messaging channel that reaches the Vietnamese retail customer at scale.
WhatsApp barely registers in Vietnam. Zalo isn’t the dominant option – it’s the only option that matters at scale.
The Zalo retail stack splits into two products. Zalo Official Account (Zalo OA) handles two-way engagement: chat-based inquiries, product catalogs via Zalo Shop, broadcast messages to followers, and chatbot support.
Zalo Notification Service (ZNS) handles one-way transactional messaging. Order confirmations, shipping updates, payment reminders, and OTPs all run through pre-approved templates with a transaction parameter on every message.
ZNS templates must be submitted for Zalo’s approval before activation – factor one to two weeks into your launch timeline when planning a Vietnam rollout.
Each ZNS template carries rich formatting: tables, images, and CTAs that look like a styled email but read inside Zalo.
Zalo Pay closes the purchase inside the super-app, alongside Zalo Bank for credit. Verification requires a Vietnamese legal entity and business license, so cross-border retailers need either a local arm or a local CPaaS partner to run a full OA and ZNS program.
Read More: Zalo Notification Services: Scalable, Secure Messaging for High-Growth Businesses
WhatsApp As One Channel Among Many
WhatsApp still matters. With three billion monthly active users and message open rates above 95%, it’s the right pick for Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore retail audiences.
However, the mistake is treating that as a SEA-wide playbook. A Bangkok shopper isn’t reading her WhatsApp; she’s in LINE. A Manila buyer is on Viber. A Hanoi customer is on Zalo.
Forcing a WhatsApp-first strategy into these markets doesn’t just underperform; it signals to local customers that your brand doesn’t understand them.
Shoppers notice when a brand communicates on a channel they rarely use, and that friction erodes trust before a single promotion lands.
The smarter approach is channel mapping before campaign planning. Identify where your target audience actually spends their time in each market, then build your messaging stack around that reality.
Run WhatsApp where it leads, and pair it with the dominant local channel everywhere else. Don’t push a WhatsApp-first program into a market where the channel is a distant third.
Read More: Automate, Engage, Convert: A WhatsApp Customer Engagement Strategy That Works
Revenue Tactics That Travel Across Channels
The core tactics of conversational commerce are channel-agnostic. The format changes; the play stays the same.
Abandoned cart recovery: a templated reminder with the product image and a one-tap link back to checkout. The play is identical in every market. The format changes by channel:
- Indonesia/Malaysia/Singapore: WhatsApp template message
- Thailand: LINE Rich Message
- Philippines: Viber broadcast with CTA button
- Vietnam: Zalo ZNS notification with order parameter
One strategy. Four executions. No customer left behind because they were on the wrong app.
Product discovery: rich media catalogs delivered in chat, with images, descriptions, and prices. WhatsApp catalogs hold up to 500 items and are searchable – suited for large inventories. Viber catalogs hold up to 50 items, which means curated collections rather than full stock. LINE MyShop and Zalo Shop function as complete in-chat storefronts, replacing a separate e-commerce site for many SEA retailers.
Post-purchase upsell: after a delivery confirmation, suggest a complementary product while the buying experience is still fresh. The trigger is the same on every channel; the message format flexes per platform.
Chatbots across all four channels: Chatbots handle the volume that human agents can’t. Product recommendations, order status, FAQ responses, and abandoned cart triggers all run at scale through automated flows – freeing your sales team for the high-value conversations that close deals.
Measuring Performance Across Four Messaging Stacks
Revenue attribution is where most conversational commerce programs stall. When you’re running on four messaging stacks, you need channel-level visibility, not a single aggregate number.
Track these metrics per channel – not as a single aggregate:
- Conversation-sourced revenue: how much originates from LINE vs. WhatsApp vs. Viber vs. Zalo
- Cart recovery rate: percentage of abandoned carts recovered per channel
- Revenue per conversation: average revenue generated per chat interaction
- Cost per conversation: total messaging plus agent cost divided by conversations handled
- Open rate and click-through rate: channel-level engagement benchmarks
Run each channel for at least four weeks before comparing – cadence and audience size differ across platforms, so early data can mislead.
The per-channel view tells you where to scale. A channel with high open rates but low conversion needs better catalog or CTA design. A channel with high conversion but low volume needs audience growth. The metrics show you which problem to solve next.
How 8×8 Powers Multi-channel Conversational Commerce
One vendor. One inbox. One campaign engine. That’s what 8×8 offers – and it’s the capability most WhatsApp-first platforms can’t match.
Most conversational commerce platforms are WhatsApp-first. That works in markets where WhatsApp dominates. It doesn’t work across SEA, where the channel mix shifts every border.
8×8 Converse is the unified inbox for sales and support teams. WhatsApp, Viber, LINE, Zalo, and SMS all surface in one workspace, so a customer who starts a purchase on Viber and follows up on Zalo never has to repeat herself, and the agent never has to switch tools.
8×8 Connect powers the campaign and automation layer. It runs broadcasts, segmentation, and scheduling as well as triggered flows like cart recovery and post-purchase upsell. Channel choice happens at send time based on each customer’s preference.
The channel-specific products plug into the same platform: 8×8 WhatsApp Business API, Viber for Business, LINE for Business, and Zalo for Business. And because all four feed into the same analytics dashboard, you get channel-level visibility without building a separate reporting layer for each market.
Read More: Stop Losing Customers: How an Omnichannel Messaging Platform Drives Conversions
Every Unanswered Chat Is Lost Revenue
Retail businesses that meet customers on their preferred channel – LINE in Bangkok, Viber in Manila, Zalo in Hanoi, WhatsApp in Jakarta – are capturing revenue that WhatsApp-first competitors leave on the table. 8×8 is built to help you be present on all four.
Conversational commerce is growing at 15% annually, and 66% of consumers are ready to buy through chat.
The retailers that build this capability now capture customers that competitors lose to checkout friction, ignored messages, and disconnected channel experiences.
Your buyers are on LINE in Bangkok, Viber in Manila, Zalo in Hanoi, and WhatsApp in Jakarta. Every unanswered chat on every one of those channels is revenue your competitor picks up.
Talk to 8×8 to build the stack that reaches all of them.
FAQ – Conversational Commerce
- What is conversational commerce? Conversational commerce is e-commerce conducted through messaging channels like WhatsApp, Viber, LINE, and Zalo. Product discovery, recommendations, and purchase completion all happen inside a single chat thread.
- Which messaging channel works best in each SEA market? LINE dominates Thailand. Viber leads in the Philippines. Zalo is essential in Vietnam. WhatsApp leads in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore. SMS is the universal fallback.
- How does conversational commerce compare to email for cart recovery? Cart recovery on chat channels achieves 15-35% recovery rates, compared to 2-5% for email. Higher visibility and richer in-chat content drive the difference.
- What role do chatbots play in conversational commerce? Chatbots handle routine commerce interactions like product recommendations, order status, and FAQ responses at scale, freeing human agents for complex sales conversations.
- How do I measure conversational commerce ROI across channels? Track conversation-sourced revenue, cart recovery rate, revenue per conversation, and cost per conversation, broken out by channel. The per-channel split shows where to scale.
