Services that will allow its users to make in-app purchases and hosting would now be offered by WhatsApp, said the app owner Facebook Inc.
Analysts view this latest move by the company as a part of its efforts to boost revenue from the app while also stitching together an infrastructure for e-commerce through the United States.
Increasing sale from its from higher-growth units such as Instagram and WhatsApp is being attempted to be achieved by the largest social media company of the world. WhatsApp was acquired by Facebook in 2014 in a deal worth $19 billion but it has also been slow to monetise the very popular messaging app.
Businesses will now be able to sell products inside WhatsApp via Facebook Shops with this set of new changes in the app. Facebook Shops is the social media company’s online store that was launched in May this year with the aim of offering users a seamless shopping experience across all of the apps of the company.
The company had previously also announced its plans to venture into the fast growing cloud computing sector and plans to offer clients and companies that use its customer service messaging tools the options of storing those messages on the remotely placed servers of the company.
The shopping tool would start rolling out this year while the company will roll out the message hosting services to firms in 2021, said WhatsApp's chief operating officer, Matt Idema, in an interview to the media.
With the aim of trying to draw new paying customers to its enterprise tools for which Facebook charges 0.5 cents to 9 cents per message delivered, it would be offering the new hosting services on WhatsApp for free, Idema said.
A relatively small customer base of tens of thousands of businesses is currently present with the app while its more limited free tools aimed at small businesses is used by tens of millions of firms.
Idema said that each day on WhatsApp, more than 175 million people in total interact with a business.
"The revenue is small today, by comparison to Facebook at large, but we think the opportunity is pretty big," he said.
When users will chat on WhatsApp with a business that uses the WhatsApp’s new hosting service, the chats would disclose that those conversations are stored elsewhere and are not protected by the usual end to end encryption available in general messaging of the app, Idema said.
He added that message data hosted on its servers would not be used by Facebook for other business purposes.
(Source:www.business-standard.com)
Analysts view this latest move by the company as a part of its efforts to boost revenue from the app while also stitching together an infrastructure for e-commerce through the United States.
Increasing sale from its from higher-growth units such as Instagram and WhatsApp is being attempted to be achieved by the largest social media company of the world. WhatsApp was acquired by Facebook in 2014 in a deal worth $19 billion but it has also been slow to monetise the very popular messaging app.
Businesses will now be able to sell products inside WhatsApp via Facebook Shops with this set of new changes in the app. Facebook Shops is the social media company’s online store that was launched in May this year with the aim of offering users a seamless shopping experience across all of the apps of the company.
The company had previously also announced its plans to venture into the fast growing cloud computing sector and plans to offer clients and companies that use its customer service messaging tools the options of storing those messages on the remotely placed servers of the company.
The shopping tool would start rolling out this year while the company will roll out the message hosting services to firms in 2021, said WhatsApp's chief operating officer, Matt Idema, in an interview to the media.
With the aim of trying to draw new paying customers to its enterprise tools for which Facebook charges 0.5 cents to 9 cents per message delivered, it would be offering the new hosting services on WhatsApp for free, Idema said.
A relatively small customer base of tens of thousands of businesses is currently present with the app while its more limited free tools aimed at small businesses is used by tens of millions of firms.
Idema said that each day on WhatsApp, more than 175 million people in total interact with a business.
"The revenue is small today, by comparison to Facebook at large, but we think the opportunity is pretty big," he said.
When users will chat on WhatsApp with a business that uses the WhatsApp’s new hosting service, the chats would disclose that those conversations are stored elsewhere and are not protected by the usual end to end encryption available in general messaging of the app, Idema said.
He added that message data hosted on its servers would not be used by Facebook for other business purposes.
(Source:www.business-standard.com)
Homepage
Send to a friend
Printable version
Share
