
Building for People, and Now Businesses - doppp
https://blog.whatsapp.com/10000633/Building-for-People-and-Now-Businesses
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Maarten88
Finally!

The information they give is not much, however. They'll run a closed pilot.
They are building a free business tool. Will there be an API? Will it be
possible to develop bots? Will WhatsApp get features like cards, custom
keyboards, payments, etc? Undoubtedly it'll cost money eventually, right? Will
it be aimed at big companies or smaller ones too?

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sgt
I'm pretty sure there must be an API.

Businesses want to respond with a text immediately and provide a way for
people to interact with the company even outside business hours.

What would be cool is a way for the app to hand over control to a manual
WhatsApp user (i.e. the employee) if necessary and continue the conversation
there.

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jmknoll
Very interesting. WeChat has been doing official business accounts for a
couple of years - I'm interested to see if WhatsApp takes these in a similar
direction.

Official WeChat accounts have become the primary way that small businesses in
China keep in touch with their customers, and a very significant source of
revenue, for online and offline sales, through WeChat Pay.

Especially considering the extensive use of WhatsApp in less-developed markets
like India, Indonesia, and Brazil, Facebook could be putting themselves into a
very strong position as an enabler of commerce in these markets. Could we
possibly even be looking at Facebook Pay if these business accounts take off?

Info about official WeChat accounts -[https://walkthechat.com/wechat-official-
account-simple-guide...](https://walkthechat.com/wechat-official-account-
simple-guide/)

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soneca
In Brazil, companies of all sizes already use Whatsapp for Customer Support,
as it is by far the most effective channel to communicate with current
customers.

Companies buy cellphones that stay in the office with sole purpose of using
Whatsapp with customers.

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gardnr
> a verified profile so people can identify a business

They seem really keen to verify identities of end users as well. Why does
WhatsApp need access to your contact list for you to start a new conversation
when you can just type the number in?

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ap46
And the oops-I-did-it spam begins.

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spiderfarmer
It's opt-in.

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hypfer
Just use Telegram.

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Jamieee
Or if you're security conscious[1] use Signal.

[1] - [https://www.eff.org/node/82654](https://www.eff.org/node/82654)

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wruza
At the time we looked for really secure messaging and voice calls, Signal did
show very poor voice quality even over wifi in our country. While the choice
of secure communication should be based on mentioned features, it must also be
usable at least (and have decent interface for regular chats/groups). So it
depends. Telegram implemented voice calls pretty good, i.e. one can speak and
be heard on daily basis. I don't know if things got better with Signal, would
be nice to hear the feedback from various regular users.

Correct me if i'm wrong, but there was also no incidents of secret chat
leaking from the beginning, so trusting one push-provider over the other by
just EFF preferences seems like a nonsense to me.

