Facebook Inc has announced that its WhatsApp messaging app will start offering in-app purchases and hosting services. With this, the company is trying to increase sales from higher-growth units such as Instagram and WhatsApp, which it bought in 2014 for $19 billion but has been slow to monetize.
This enables businesses to sell products inside WhatsApp via Facebook Shops. It is an online store launched in May to offer a unified shopping experience across Facebook's apps.
The company will also make its entry in the cloud computing sector and will offer 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 in an interview that the shopping tool would start rolling out this year, while message hosting would become available in 2021. Idema also said that 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.
The app 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.
Idema pointed out that in total over 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,” he said.
Idema said chats with a business using the new hosting service will disclose that those conversations are stored elsewhere and not protected by the app's end-to-end encryption.
Facebook would not use message data hosted on its servers for other business purposes, he added.
