The parent company has been looking for a suitable business model for the app for some time.
(Photo: imago images/onw-images)
san francisco Eight years after the purchase of WhatsApp, the Facebook group Meta is fundamentally rebuilding the business model of the messenger service. The company has set up an interface for corporate customers and also offers paid premium services for business customers, said Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg on Thursday. This should enable companies to interact better with their customers.
“I’m excited to announce that we will be opening up WhatsApp to any business of any size around the world,” Zuckerberg said. Companies can access the platform via the WhatsApp Cloud API interface – and can send and receive messages directly to customers via WhatsApp. The use is initially free of charge – the company wants to charge money for additional services.
WhatsApp has been experimenting with access to the platform for companies for some time. However, the use was technically more complex for many companies. WhatsApp is now moving this system to the cloud to make it easier to use and open up new sources of income.
Companies currently pay WhatsApp for each message sent. Prices vary by region and number of messages sent. By the end of last year, tens of thousands of companies were set up on the non-cloud version of the corporate interface, including brands such as BMW, Vodafone, Coppel, Sears Mexico, KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, Iberia Airlines and others.
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Zuckerberg said, “Already, more than a billion users connect to a business account through our messaging services every week. They ask for help to find products and services.”
WhatsApp is considered the largest chat service in the world. More than two billion people around the world use the service every month. In Germany, more than 83 percent of Internet users use the service, as determined by the analysis service Datareportal. Another product of the meta group is in second place among the messenger services: the Facebook Messenger with around 35 percent. The messenger signal, which is considered to be particularly secure, is only around eleven percent.
The opening of the interface to users around the world is very good news, said Indian tech entrepreneur Udit Goenka. A number of programmers reported online that they had already successfully tested the new interface.
WhatsApp is taking a step that its Chinese rival WeChat took more than ten years ago. WeChat owner Tencent had opened its platform to corporate customers. Today, the service is its own online cosmos, in which users can exchange information with companies online, but also purchase and pay for products.
WhatsApp changed its terms of use for the new service last year. Concerns that more data from the chat service should be shared with Facebook caused a lot of excitement. The group always emphasized that the adjustments were only about creating a framework for communication between companies and their customers.
The Facebook group bought WhatsApp in 2014 for around 22 billion dollars. Before that, WhatsApp lived on the fee of one dollar per year, but after the takeover, Facebook struggled to establish a new business model for the service.
With agency material.
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