WhatsApp is adding a shopping button to its popular instant messaging app that goes live today globally. However, India will get it later. As a part of its expansion plans for business accounts, the Facebook-backed messaging platform wants to help businesses interact with customers and provide their services with more ease. Later, WhatsApp will also add more shopping features to the app including sharing catalogue, adding products to cart and check out, all without leaving the app.
WhatsApp claims that over 175 million users interact with a Business account everyday globally and according to a survey by The Harris Poll, over 81 percent of Indians prefer using messaging to communicate with businesses. For WhatsApp, India is its largest market with over 400 million users as of July 2019 and the company has been working on its payments solution, WhatsApp Pay for quite some time now.
For its new features, WhatsApp is leveraging the Facebook Shop platform that was introduced earlier this year for small and medium businesses. When the system is fully integrated into WhatsApp, a user can just start a conversation with a business storefront and browse through its offerings, chat with it instantly, select products to purchase and make the payment instantly.
Moreover, Facebook is also planning to release its own hosting services for the businesses to manage their WhatsApp messages. “Businesses have varying technology needs and want choice in the companies they work with to host and manage customer communications, particularly with remote work increasing. Which is why over the coming months, we plan to expand our partnerships with business solution providers we've worked with over the last two years,” the company wrote in a blog post. Of course, these services will be chargeable for business consumers as Facebook wants its most popular messaging app to “continue building a business” of its own.
Many local and hyperlocal businesses in India currently rely on WhatsApp to communicate and reach out to potential customers with means of text updates, images and videos. With the roll-out of WhatsApp Pay in India, whenever it happens, has the potential to perfectly unify the shopping experience for customers on WhatsApp.
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