Rich Card

What a rich card looks like

Picture a product tile in a mobile shopping app: a big photo on top, a bold headline, a short description, and two or three buttons like "Buy now," "See more," and "Save for later." A rich card is exactly that, except it lives inside a text message conversation in the native messages app.

Rich cards are the workhorse format of RCS Business Messaging. They turn what would have been a paragraph of plain text into a visual, tappable, conversion-optimized unit.

Anatomy of a rich card

A standard RCS rich card includes:

• A hero media slot (image, GIF, or short video)
• A title (one short line)
• A description (a few lines of body copy)
• Up to four suggested actions or replies
• An optional tap-action on the card itself

Carousels chain multiple rich cards horizontally so the user can swipe through, for example, a list of flights, hotels, products, or service options.

Where rich cards win

Rich cards consistently outperform plain text in every business use case where visual context matters:

• Product discovery and shopping
• Appointment selection (showing available slots as a carousel)
• Service plan comparison
• Travel itinerary confirmation
• Real estate listings
• Restaurant menus
• Customer support troubleshooting trees

The combination of imagery, structured content, and immediate action buttons collapses what used to take a dozen taps in a mobile web flow into one or two taps inside the conversation.

Design rules that actually matter

A rich card lives in a tight visual frame. The hero image should be high-resolution and crop well at common card aspect ratios. The title should be scannable in under a second. The description should be one purpose, not a paragraph. The action buttons should be verbs that tell the user what happens next.

The most common mistake is treating a rich card like a mini email. It is not. It is a single decision moment in a conversation, and the design should reflect that.