Brand
The Brazilian retail giant created a unique end-to-end shopping experience entirely within WhatsApp, hosted by Lu, the brand’s popular virtual influencer. By combining AI shopping assistance with key features such as card carousels, WhatsApp Flows and payments on WhatsApp, Magalu achieved a 3X higher conversion rate than with its usual ecommerce channels.*
3X
higher conversion rate than Magalu’s app and ecommerce site*
85-point
Net Promoter Score, attributed to the new virtual shopping experience on WhatsApp*
75%
of payments were made using the integrated Pix copy-and-paste feature enabled by payments on WhatsApp*
*Results are self-reported and not identifiably repeatable. Generally expected individual results will differ.
Their Story
Merging traditional retail with digital
Magalu is one of Brazil’s largest retailers, known for its omnichannel ecosystem that merges traditional retail stores with the convenience and selection of a massive online marketplace.
Their Goal
End-to-end conversational shopping
Company leadership sought to push the boundaries of ecommerce by developing and launching a complete, end-to-end shopping experience on WhatsApp Business Platform, with a goal to move customers seamlessly from product discovery to purchase without ever having to leave the conversation.
“By integrating discovery, decision-making, and payments into a single conversation using WhatsApp’s powerful solutions, we have not only made shopping more convenient but also more engaging. Our customers have responded incredibly positively, and the results speak for themselves. We believe this is the future of retail, and WhatsApp is helping us make it happen.”
Frederico Trajano,
CEO, Magalu
Their Solution
Building a digital storefront on WhatsApp
Magalu leveraged AI language models and agents to assist customers at every stage of the shopping journey, including onboarding, product recommendations, checkout and after-sales order tracking and surveys. The experience was internally named Lu’s Brain after its host, Magalu’s popular AI-powered brand persona, Lu. Unlike traditional rule-based chatbots, Lu´s Brain operates as an AI-powered shopping agent capable of understanding natural language, voice inputs and product images, dynamically adapting to each customer´s intent and context.
Customers could search for products using text, images or even voice, a multimedia approach that helped transform WhatsApp conversations into immersive shopping journeys. In addition to AI capabilities, Magalu relied on a wide range of WhatsApp solutions to bring Lu’s Brain to life, with card carousels, WhatsApp Flows and payments on WhatsApp each playing especially important roles. Marketing messages on WhatsApp served as a primary entrypoint to the experience.
Card carousels within the Lu’s Brain experience on WhatsApp Business Platform enabled Magalu to proactively engage customers with personalized product recommendations based on their preferences and shopping history. The feature provided a dynamic, visually rich interface that allowed customers to browse curated product selections in a swipeable format, without ever leaving WhatsApp.
Magalu used WhatsApp Flows to design structured, conversational customer experiences centered around detailed product pages sourced directly from Magalu’s product catalog. Customers were shown comprehensive information, including high-quality images, product details, pricing and installment payment plans, customer reviews and more.
Once a customer selected a product, they could complete their purchase using payments on WhatsApp, which is available to Brazilian businesses and is integrated with Pix, a common Brazilian instant payment system. Customers received a Pix code directly within the conversation, which they could copy and paste into their banking app to finalize the purchase securely and instantly without sharing sensitive financial information directly in the conversation. Lu’s Brain followed up to customers with real-time shipping updates to close the loop.
By combining discovery, assistance, checkout, payment and post-sale engagement into a single persistent conversation thread, Magalu effectively recreated the entire ecommerce funnel inside WhatsApp. Rather than sending customers across multiple touchpoints, Lu´s Brain collapsed the journey into one continuous and intelligent dialogue.
Their Success
Optimized ecommerce performance
Over a six-week period (October 21 to December 3, 2025), Lu’s Brain delivered higher conversion rates and a robust Net Promoter Score compared to Magalu’s traditional ecommerce approach:
- 3X higher conversion rate than Magalu’s app and ecommerce site*
- 85-point Net Promoter Score, attributed to the new virtual shopping experience on WhatsApp*
- 75% of payments were made using the integrated Pix copy-and-paste feature enabled by payments on WhatsApp*
*Results are self-reported and not identifiably repeatable. Generally expected individual results will differ.
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