WhatsApp is testing a new payment function integrated into its messaging system, allowing you to pay for purchases directly in a conversation, without leaving the application. An ambitious bet, and not easy to implement…
With its 2 billion monthly active users and tens of billions of messages exchanged every day, WhatsApp has a solid presence in the world. Meta seeks to make its instant messaging even more indispensable. And what could be better than making it a trading platform? As she announces in a blog post, Mark Zuckerberg’s company is beginning to test an integrated payment function so that users can pay for purchases directly in a conversation, without leaving the application. No haste, however, since this is only an experiment carried out with a small number of Brazilian companies, with a wider deployment in the country in the coming months. Suffice to say that we are not close to seeing the color of it!
Payment in WhatsApp: simplifying transactions on the application
WhatsApp’s new feature allows users to make purchases using Mastercard or Visa credit, debit or prepaid cards, “without having to go to a website, open another app or pay in person”. “You can search for a business, browse products and services, add them to your shopping cart and make a payment, all with a few clicks”, explains Meta. To accept these payments, companies can link a service provider like Cielo, Mercado Pago or Rede to their account. Indeed, these companies had already set up the technical infrastructure necessary for peer-to-peer payment on WhatsApp in Brazil during a previous Meta attempt. Like all functions of WhatsApp, payments are designed to be secure. According to Mark Zuckerberg’s company, card numbers are “encrypted and stored securely”. Additionally, users must create a payment PIN and use it for each payment.
So far, Brazilian WhatsApp users couldn’t make transactions through the app’s payment service. Companies were therefore forced to use a third-party payment service to generate payment links and send them via message. So it’s, on paper at least, a good thing that the courier now offers a direct payment feature.
Payment in WhatsApp: a difficult function to set up
Meta has chosen to test this function in Brazil because it claims more than 5 million companies using WhatsApp in this country which has greatly increased its digital payments in recent years. In addition, the company had already tried to offer a payment system in instant messaging. This had proven complicated, as it was trying to offer both peer-to-peer transfers and payment services to merchants within its app. On the peer-to-peer side, WhatsApp had quickly seen the service suspended by the country’s central bank and it had been unable to roll it out to merchants. Stores could use a third-party payment service to generate a payment link and include it in a WhatsApp message, but this could lead to scams and security issues due to the transaction’s lack of transparency.
This is not – or not yet – the case in France, but the “business” dimension of WhatsApp is very popular in certain countries, with companies using instant messaging as customer service and/or commercial chatbot. In India, the application has even launched mini e-commerce sites integrated directly into the app and received government approval to offer payment services to 100 million users. WhatsApp therefore seems to want to be much more than a simple instant messaging service…