WhatsApp is FINALLY enabling payments, making its "WhatsApp Business" offering more complete.
This move, makes it possible for consumers to complete a purchase from inside of a chat on WhatsApp.
It will allow the 50million businesses on WhatsApp to engage in 1-2-1 'social selling,' together with the 175 million consumers who message businesses on the messaging platform.
With WeChat as a reference point, it is easy to see how this will develop. In China, brands are several steps ahead in this practice of building ‘private traffic’ through conversational social - cultivating engagement and sales with individuals - while fueling advocacy through KOCs (“Key Opinion Consumers”).
To be really effective at this, brands will need to develop more detailed Social CRM systems and start looking at how to scale 1-2-1 engagement. This is a big change for social media teams who are currently organized around 'one-to-many' monthly content schedules.
