Facebook to process payments on WhatsApp Business

• India is expected to witness a manifold increase in mobile payments with the number of users increasing from 180m to 800m by the end of 2025.

Bengaluru: Facebook plans to start enabling shopping tools and payment collection to merchants using WhatsApp for business, more than two years after it started beta testing a similar feature in India.

The company also announced that it plans to launch a new hosting service allowing businesses to store customer communication on the cloud.

“We will expand ways for people to check out available products and make purchases right from a chat,” the company said in a new post. More than 175 million users are using WhatsApp Business accounts daily.

India was the first country for Facebook to beta test the WhatsApp Pay with over a million registrations.

However, Facebook is still awaiting regulatory approvals even as rivals Google Pay and local players like Paytm and PhoePe have expanded their service and reach.

Google Pay vs Paytm

There are conflicting reports about who leads the list.

However, S&P Global Market Intelligence points out that Google Pay and PhonePe lead the list and together handled over seven billion transactions, representing more than two-thirds of UPI transactions in 2019.

“In contrast, Paytm’s UPI transaction volumes were underwhelming, although the company holds a substantial share in wallets. For PhonePe, wallet transactions are insignificant, whereas Google Pay does not offer non-UPI payment methods,” it said in its latest report. According to it, mobile payments rose 163 per cent to $286 billion in 2019.

Meanwhile, as per estimates by Redseer Consulting, Paytm with 16 million merchants on board tops the list with 50 per cent market share followed by PhonePe (30 per cent) and Google Pay (10 per cent).

Digital payments industry in India currently stands at Rs2,153 trillion, and thanks to favourable government policies and strong use case of merchant payments across user cohorts, will grow at 27 per cent annual growth rate to reach Rs7,092 trillion by 2025.

Mobile payments are expected to grow at 58 per cent growth rate to reach Rs245 trillion by 2025, a report by Redseer Consulting said.

India is expected to witness a manifold increase in mobile payments with the number of users increasing from 180 million to 800 million by the end of 2025.

It is this market share that Facebook wants to tap into, especially as it has the largest user base is in India with 400 million daily users.

Meanwhile, amidst the Covid-19 pandemic and the lockdown, Facebook in the US launched Facebook Shop in August, which came almost a month after it launched a complementary shopping destination on Instagram called Instagram Shop.

“We also want to make it easier for businesses to integrate these features into their existing commerce and customer solutions. This will help many small businesses who have been most impacted in this time,” Facebook said in its latest blog post.

Facebook hosting service

With regards to the new hosting service, Facebook says that it will create an option for businesses to manage their WhatsApp messages via hosting services that Facebook plans to offer and plans to roll out the service during the coming months.

“Providing this option will make it easier for small and medium-size businesses to get started, sell products, keep their inventory up to date, and quickly respond to messages they receive – wherever their employees,” it added.

According to a report by Reuters, citing WhatsApp chief operating officer, Matt Idema, the shopping tool would start rolling out this year, while message hosting would become available in 2021 and will be currently offered for free

Although Facebook did not specify how much it would charge for the shopping and payment tool, it said it will charge business customers for some of the services and added that it will help WhatsApp continue building a business of our own while we provide and expand free end-to-end encrypted text, video and voice calling for more than two billion people.