WhatsApp, the Facebook-owned free platform for messaging services, recently announced to have launched a catalog feature to the WhatsApp Business App for both iPhone and Android phones.
Although the feature will be initially available for WhatsApp Business users in Germany, Brazil, Indonesia, India, Mexico, the US, and the UK, it appears that the company is eventually planning to launch the feature globally.
The announcement seemingly follows Facebook’s efforts to boost revenue from Instagram and WhatsApp, which boasts of around 1.5 billion users. Facebook’s signature News Feed service continues to attract substantial advertising revenue but fails to develop a lot of new subscribers.
According to reliable sources, more than 100 companies are currently using the paid product feature, while up to 5 million are using the free WhatsApp Business services.
Although most of the enterprises interact with customers through WhatsApp chats, businesses had to send each photo individually and provide limited information to its customers. The feature will help in keeping customers involved while interacting with companies without using its websites.
WhatsApp claimed that the new feature will offer customers a complete catalog of the businesses within the WhatsApp platform. For instance, an enterprise can add more information including description, product code and price for each item in its catalog.
The company, which has faced come outage issues in the past as well as ongoing regulatory investigations, further added that this will not only help make businesses look professional but also help save space in the storage on phones, of both customers and businesses.
Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg has reportedly disclosed plans to move the focus of the company to private chats by incorporating chatbots and AI reality tools, to enable businesses to connect to their customers through its messaging service applications.
Notably, last year Facebook said it would charge corporations for sending advertising and customer service messages through WhatsApp. The American social media giant had mentioned that the charges would be at a fixed rate, ranging from 0.5 to 9 cents per message as per the country.
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