Hosting and buying, Facebook launches new services via WhatsApp

Facebook, which has the largest social networking network in the world with more than 2.7 billion monthly active users, is trying to increase sales from its services that have a higher growth rate than its social network, such as: Instagram photo and video sharing service, and the instant messaging service WhatsApp, which It bought it in 2014 for $19 billion, but it hasn’t made the required income yet, according to tech portal aitnews.

The new changes to the “WhatsApp” application enable companies to sell products directly within the application through “Facebook Shops”, an online store launched by Facebook last May to provide a unified shopping experience through the company’s applications.

Facebook will also enter the cloud computing sector, providing companies that use messaging tools for customer service the ability to store these messages on Facebook’s servers.

WhatsApp Chief of Operations Matt Idema said in an interview: The shopping tool will start appearing before the end of this year, while hosting messages will become available in 2021.

He added that WhatsApp will provide the hosting service for free to try to attract new paying customers for enterprise tools, which charge from half a cent to 9 cents for every message delivered.

The app has a relatively small client base of tens of thousands of companies, while tens of millions use its limited free tools aimed at small businesses.

In total, more than 175 million people interact with a company every day on WhatsApp, Idema said.

Idema continued, “The revenues are low today, compared to Facebook in general, but we think the opportunity is very big.”

He added that chats with a company that uses the new hosting service will reveal that these conversations are stored elsewhere, and are not protected by the application’s end-to-end encryption.

“Facebook will not use the data of the messages hosted on its servers for other commercial purposes,” he concluded.