WhatsApp announces free Business app, will charge big enterprises

WhatsApp is gearing up to finally monetize its messaging app by charging large enterprise businesses for tools to better communicate with customers. WhatsApp will also offer a free app to small-to-medium sized businesses, though it hasn’t outlined the specific functionality of the app.

The Whatsapp Business app will allow global companies “to provide customers with useful notifications like flight times, delivery confirmations, and other updates”.

According to Whatsapp officials, the app is meant to facilitate “someone placing an order with a local bakery or looking at new styles from a clothing store” and “shopkeepers who use WhatsApp to stay in touch with hundreds of customers from a single smartphone”, plus offer “an easier way to respond to messages.”

Purpose of Whatsapp business

Perhaps WhatsApp could charge enterprises like “airlines, e-commerce sites, and banks” to have multiple representatives managing an account or sending high volumes of messages. It could also charge for artificial intelligence bot functionality or e-commerce transactions.

WhatsApp also officially announced its closed pilot program for verifying business accounts with a green checkmark to distinguish them from personal accounts and fakes.

WhatsApp began testing verified accounts for businesses a week ago. Conversations with businesses are encrypted and they can be blocked. Interestingly, if a business isn’t already in your phone number contacts, its name will appear as whatever they register themselves as instead of their number.

This could allow WhatsApp to create a business search engine with optional sponsored results, or let businesses, cold-message people, possibly for a fee.

Businesses on WhatsApp may need to be contacted by a user first before they can respond with organic or sponsored messages. That’s how Facebook Messenger works, and it’s led to businesses buying “tap-to-message” ads on Facebook’s News Feed to get people to initiate conversations so the business can follow up with sponsored messages.

The company also says that the enterprise solution will initially be free but it does plan to charge businesses. Some functionality that will be offered by the Business app and enterprise solution includes the ability to create a verified profile with info like address, description, and hours, plus “Features for helping manage customer chats like away messages for when businesses are not able to respond at the moment.

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