WhatsApp announces free Business app, will charge big enterprises

WhatsApp is gearing up to finally monetize its messaging app by charging large enterprise

 businesses for tools to better communicate with customers. WhatsApp will also offer a

 free app to small-to-medium sized businesses, though it hasn’t outlined the specific 

functionality 

of the app. The enterprise solution will allow global companies “to provide customers 

with useful notifications like flight times, delivery confirmations, and other updates”.

“We do intend on charging businesses in the future,” WhatsApp’s Chief Operating 

Officer Matt Idema told the Wall Street Journal. “We don’t have the details of monetization

 figured out.”

The company did write that it wants to facilitate “someone placing an order with a

 local bakery or looking at new styles from a clothing store” and “shopkeepers who use 

WhatsApp to stay in touch with hundreds of customers from a single smartphone”,

 plus offer “an easier way to respond to messages.”

Perhaps WhatsApp could charge enterprises like “airlines, e-commerce sites, and 

banks” to have multiple representatives managing an account or sending high volumes 

of messages. It could also charge for artificial intelligence bot functionality or ecommerce 

transactions.

WhatsApp also officially announced its closed pilot program for verifying business 

accounts with a green checkmark to distinguish them from personal accounts and fakes.

WhatsApp began testing verified accounts for businesses a week ago. Conversations

 with businesses are encrypted and they can be blocked. Interestingly, if a business

 isn’t already in your phone number contacts, its name will appear as whatever they 

register themselves as instead of their number. This could allow WhatsApp to create a

 business search engine with optional sponsored results, or let businesses 

cold-message people, possibly for a fee.

Alternatively, businesses on WhatsApp may need to be contacted by a user first 

before they can respond with organic or sponsored messages. That’s how Facebook 

Messenger works, and it’s led to businesses buying “tap-to-message” ads on Facebook’s 

News Feed to get people to initiate conversations so the business can follow up

 with sponsored messages. Not allowing cold-message ads meshes with WhatsApp 

writing that it plans to “make it easier for people to communicate with the businesses

 they want to reach on WhatsApp”, emphasis mine.

[Update: WhatsApp now confirms our hunch, telling TechCrunch “Businesses will 

only be able to contact people who have provided their phone number and agreed to 

be contacted by the business over WhatsApp.”

The company also says that the enterprise solution will initially be free but it does

 plan to charge businesses. Some functionality that will be offered by the Business 

app and enterprise solution includes the ability to create a verified profile with info 

like address, description, 

and hours, plus “Features for helping manage customer chats like away messages for 

when businesses are not able to respond at the moment.”]