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WhatsApp Commerce for real

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Victor
Victor Senior Business Consultant Sprykee Posts: 9 🧑🏻‍🚀 - Cadet
edited November 2023 in Product & Business Questions

Conversational commerce has been buzzing for some time now with some interesting use cases here and there but not many real successful end-to-end commerce examples rolled out at scale - well, maybe excluding Chinese ones leveraging WeChat Pay and AliPay.

WhatsApp has been moving in the same direction, discreetly, with increasing capabilities through WhatsApp Business and its API. But the experience isn't truly end-to-end in most cases as normally the features are limited (like catalogues only holding up to 30 items), a lot of disambiguation is needed (in order to nail down what the actual buyer wants - this is improving a lot thanks to AI) or the actual payment needs to happen outside of the app... The only places where WhatsApp Pay is available is India, Brazil and Singapore (partially). That is where the real WhatsApp Commerce potential can be reached.

Any good case studies of WhatsApp Commerce / Pay for true eCommerce E2E solutions? Or tech vendors being used to facilitate the integration?

Comments

  • Lauren Kulwicki
    Lauren Kulwicki (ex) Senior Community Manager Posts: 196 🪐 - Explorer
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    Just now learning about WhatsApp Pay because of this post & I'm excited about it. As an expat, I use Vemno with my US contacts and PayPal with my European contacts, but I use WhatsApp to communicate with everyone generally. If it's a user-friendly experience, I'd be more inclined to move my payments over to WA to streamline my channels/apps. I would be curious to hear more about any successful e-commerce solutions leveraging WhatsApp's capabilities. I'll be keeping an eye on this now - thanks!

  • Victor
    Victor Senior Business Consultant Sprykee Posts: 9 🧑🏻‍🚀 - Cadet
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    I agree with you @Lauren Kulwicki ! Just to elaborate on this (and by pure coincidence!) the New York Times released this a few days ago on how Mark Zuckerberg is now making WhatsApp a cornerstone of Meta's strategy.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/08/technology/mark-zuckerberg-whatsapp.html

  • Lauren Kulwicki
    Lauren Kulwicki (ex) Senior Community Manager Posts: 196 🪐 - Explorer
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    Oo nice, thanks for the additional read! Me & some colleagues also recently discovered "WhatsApp Communities," which is already expanding on the simple text & group concept. I just hope it stays as user-friendly as it is now in its evolution! :D

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