Facebook said that its WhatsApp messaging application would start to offer in-app purchases and hosting services, as it moves to boost revenue from the application while knitting together e-commerce infrastructure across the company.
With the changes, WhatsApp will enable businesses to sell products inside WhatsApp via Facebook Shops, an online store that was launched in May to offer an unified shopping experience across Facebook's applications.
The company will also enter the cloud computing sector, offering firms who use its customer service messaging tools the ability to store those messages on Facebook servers.
WhatsApp's chief operating officer, Matt Idema, said "The shopping tool would start rolling out this year, while message hosting would become available in 2021. WhatsApp would offer the hosting service for free to try to draw new paying customers to its enterprise tools, which charge 0.5 cents to 9 cents per message delivered. In total, more than 175 million people interact with a business each day on WhatsApp. The revenue is small today, by comparison to Facebook at large, but we think the opportunity is pretty big. Chats with a business using the new hosting service will disclose that those conversations are stored elsewhere and not protected by the application's end-to-end encryption."
The application has a relatively small customer base of tens of thousands of businesses, while tens of millions use its more limited free tools aimed at small businesses. However, Facebook plans to not use message data hosted on its servers for other business purposes.
Source - Economic Times
