Facebook adds hosting, shopping features, and pricing tiers to WhatsApp business

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Facebook is bringing three major additions to WhatsApp for business. The company is introducing away you can shop, and pay for goods through chats.

Facebook says it will be making it possible for merchants to add “buy” buttons in other places that will take shoppers to WhatsApp chats to complete the purchase. “We also want to make it easier for businesses to integrate these features into their existing commerce and customer solutions. This will help many small businesses who have been most impacted in this time.”

The company says it will work with hosting providers through the Facebook Hosting Services, part of the newly integrated products to host its online assets and activities. Facebook says the program will be available in the coming months. ” We’re sharing our plans now while we work with our partners to make these services available,”

The new development adds to the recently introduced features where business can share their catalogs in chats and the addition of QR codes. Earlier on, the company also launched a WhatsApp payments feature in Brazil in June this year, however, the development was shut down by regulators for failure to meet a section of the given requirements.

In-line with its expansion, Facebook says it will soon start to charge companies using WhatsApp for business.

Commenting on the changes, Facebook says, “all businesses using our API are using either an on-premise solution or leverage a solutions provider, both of which require costly servers to maintain.” Hence, there will be provisions where companies will be charged for a number of services like messaging and give them the option to use Facebook free hosting for small and medium-sized businesses.

“Providing this option will make it easier for small and medium size businesses to get started, sell products, keep their inventory up to date, and quickly respond to messages they receive – wherever their employees are,” it notes.

Another comment from finance yahoo notes that Facebook has an app store os with partners which it works with to provide marketing and related services to businesses on its platform thus, it will sell the hosting alongside that.

Facebook is yet to confirm the exact time this rollout will happen but we will assuredly keep you posted on the developments.

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