WhatsApp is piloting a new business directory in São Paulo, Brazil, which allows users to find local stores and services with a presence in the application, the head of the service. Will Cathcart has announced. The screenshots show how WhatsApp will display businesses sorted by categories such as “grocery store” and “restaurant”, before allowing users to chat directly with them. Reuters reports that the test will include thousands of businesses in the city.
Although the Facebook-owned messaging service is more famous as a person-to-person messaging service, e-commerce has become an increasingly important part of its offering in recent years. Until last October, WhatsApp reported that more than 175 million people around the world used the service to send messages to a WhatsApp business account every day.
I am excited that we are beginning to pilot a local business directory in @WhatsApp. This will help you find and contact local businesses, such as your neighborhood coffee shop, flower shop, clothing store, and more.
– Will Cathcart (@wcathcart) September 15, 2021
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WhatsApp has offered a standalone small business app since 2018 and has since added features like product catalog and shopping cart support. In Brazil and India, it also started offering in-app payments, allowing users to make purchases directly from businesses, as well as sending money to friends and family.
But this e-commerce push created problems for WhatsApp earlier this year when it updated its privacy policy. The changes were widely interpreted to give WhatsApp the ability to share data from people’s personal chats with Facebook, when in reality the changes only applied to chats with businesses, which can view data stored on Facebook’s servers. The new policy sparked outrage, with WhatsApp’s competitors Telegram and Signal reports an increase in new users in response.
Cathcart said WhatsApp does not record the location of users or businesses they browse when using the new directory feature.
In addition to its small business app, WhatsApp also offers a WhatsApp business API to connect larger businesses with customers. It’s notable for being one of the few ways WhatsApp is directly monetized, as it doesn’t currently display ads like Facebook and Instagram. Although WhatsApp reportedly backtracked from its immediate plans to show ads in the app last year, Facebook’s vice president of business messaging Matt Idema said. Reuters that “in the long term” he expects ads to be part of WhatsApp’s business model “one way or another.”
Although the pilot is limited to one city in Brazil for now, Idema said that India and Indonesia were among the candidates for expansion in the future.
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