Mark Zuckerberg Reveals New eCommerce and Payment Platform

Facebook owned app, WhatsApp with almost around 1.3 billion users, has never let its customers down. Coming up with new features year on year has started making our lives simpler and in addition to that has set the bar high for its rival companies, We-chat, Line, Telegram, Hike messenger, etc.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg recently gave a keynote presentation at the F8 Conference in California where he announced WhatsApp is moving toward hosting web shops where customers can browse a store’s products and make purchases. This move will see WhatsApp move beyond the advertising model by becoming a competitive eCommerce platform.

WhatsApp Business

WhatsApp Business is currently a business messaging app. Businesses across the globe use it to communicate with customers. and create a profile that has basic information such as location, hours and direction.

A helpful automated response system can streamline customer communication. The ability to add labels to customers to identify their needs makes it a very bare bones customer relationship management app (CRM). Big changes are coming for WhatsApp Business. 

WhatsApp Product Catalogs

Mark Zuckerberg announced a dramatic expansion to the WhatsApp Business app, a new feature called Product Catalogs.

While Zuckerberg was light on details, he followed up by showing someone paying for goods with WhatsApp, meaning it’s highly likely WhatsApp Business Product Catalogs will feature fully functioning stores where customers can not only browse products but purchase them, too.

WhatsApp Payment System

Mark Zuckerberg also announced a new payment service that will allow people to send money to each other. Judging by the presentation images, the payment system will be tied to WhatsApp.

“All right, so let’s talk about payments, because this is a part of the vision that I’m particularly excited about. Because, when I look out at all the different ways that people interact privately, I think payments is one of the areas where we have an opportunity to make it a lot easier, that’s among the most important things that we can do here.

I believe that it should be as easy to to send money to someone as it is to send a photo. So we’re already testing this in India with about a million people.

It’s being used a lot and the feedback is great. And we’re already working on rolling this out in a number of other countries later this year.

And you can take a look at what the basic experience is and you know overall payments and private commerce is one of the areas that I’m really excited about and we’re going to have a lot more news and things to talk about here over the coming year as we flush this out more.” – Mark Zuckerberg

2019 is marking an exciting time for eCommerce as just last month it was reported Microsoft is considering launching their own eCommerce platform as well.