Today, FirstMark portfolio company Shopify announced a new free mobile app called Ping:

Ping is a standalone app that lets merchants manage customer conversations, whether they begin on a website, Facebook Messenger, or via SMS. 

Half of Shopify’s 600,000 merchants use its mobile app today, and Ping was made to give merchants a way to run their business in a conversational way, Shopify product director Michael Perry told VentureBeat in a phone interview.

Ping will include Kit, an intelligent assistant that can help merchants set goals, make Facebook ads without leaving a chat window, re-target ads, and send emails to customers. In addition to the addition of natural language processing to give merchants more insights, a revamped Kit Skills API to bring more features to the automated bot is due out in late 2018. Ping will soon use natural language processing, sentiment analysis, and other forms of AI to do things like highlight conversations that may lead to big sales, alert a merchant if a customer is angry about their order, or flag conversations likely to lead to returns.”

 

Read the full article on VentureBeat