Facebook recently laid out a new strategy for its messaging app WhatsApp, which has ~ 2 billion active users worldwide.
Facebook is one of the latest social media platforms that is
making a push to integrate shopping/eCommerce directly into its app (see my blog
post about YouTube from last week).
With the increasing use of WhatsApp for business activity, Facebook
is planning on expanding in-app shopping options to allow for purchases right
from a chat. This will give brands new tools for managing their interactions to
maximize business potential. It is even planning to charge fees for some
advanced functions. This could be a new way for Facebook to monetize WhatsApp, which
it purchased a few years ago for $19Bn with the initial plan to push ads into WhatsApp
Status, the stories-type feature of the app.
One of the reasons why Facebook had to rethink its original strategy
to monetize WhatsApp relates to privacy issues. There were concerns that
Facebook would weaken WhatsApp's privacy measures, including end-to-end
encryption, but more recently, Facebook has backed away on this approach and enhanced
privacy features are expected to stay.
The WhatsApp’s ecommerce platform is intended to work as follows.
A user messages a business, which can reply with a link to a product catalog.
The shopper can then add items to their cart and checkout from the app. Here is
a promotional video that demonstrates how it works.
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOKp7FmNJVE&feature=emb_title)
So far WhatsApp commerce has been a big focus in India,
where Facebook is working to expand its presence including the use of WhatsApp
Pay, which it can use to build on this strategy in other countries. It will be
interesting to see if WhatsApp ecommerce approach really takes off and which off
the social medial platform will turn out to capture most customer and business
interest.
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