Facebook Adds Hosting, Shopping Features and Pricing Tiers to WhatsApp Business

Facebook is bringing a bunch of eCommerce feature to WhatsApp Business.

In-chat Shopping: a new way for businesses in turn to use WhatsApp both to link through to those Facebook-native catalogs, as well as other products, and then purchase items, while still staying in the chat. Plus making it possible for merchants to add “buy” buttons in other places that will take shoppers to WhatsApp chats to complete the purchase.

Facebook Hosting Services: These will be available in the coming months, but no specific date to share right now. The idea here appears that it is specifically aimed at selling hosting services to the kind of SMBs who already use Facebook and WhatsApp messaging, who either already use hosting services for their online assets, whether that be their online stores or other things, or are finding themselves now needing to for the first time, now that business is all about being “online.”

Charging tiers: As you would expect, to encourage more adoption, Facebook has not been charging for WhatsApp Business up to now. Frustratingly, there seems so far to be no detail on which services will be charged, nor how much, nor when, so this is more of a warning than a new requirement.