Whatsapp Is Your New Shopping Catalogue

*The article was published in December 2020

Shopping catalogues have come a long way. What once would be a booklet where you would circle what you like and then pop to the shop to actually get the product are now websites that contain hundreds of products to choose from. You never even have to leave your house.

The most recent development for online and mobile shoppers is Whatsapp new virtual shopping carts. Now customers of certain products can load purchases and then fire off orders.

This move isn’t too surprising considering the number of people that use the app to conduct orders. From food to appliances, Whatsapp has become the fastest way for smaller business to make direct contact with customers. Now the company is just banking in on that aspect.

More than 175 million people contact businesses via WhatsApp daily, according to the service. The new feature is also arriving just in time to make holiday shopping all that much easier, especially at a time when no one wants to be caught in a massive crowd at the malls.

Instagram, which once only housed amateur photographers, has also incorporated an easier e-commerce function to the app by pushing the likes to the main page. Marketing campaigns and ads in newspapers cost companies big bucks but a short well-planned post on Instagram can save hundreds in marketing.

“WhatsApp is fast becoming a store counter to discuss products and coordinate sales,” the service said in a blog post. “With more and more shopping happening through chats, we want to make buying and selling even easier.”

The Difference

WhatsApp already let users browse online catalogues from shops. The addition of a “carts” feature lets people combine multiple items into a single ordered set via WhatsApp instead of tending to transactions separately, according to the service.

“Carts are great when messaging businesses that typically sell multiple items at once, like a local restaurant or clothing store,” WhatsApp said. “People can browse a catalogue, select multiple products and send the order as one message to the business.”

Addition of the feature came less than a month after Facebook announced a deal to buy Kustomer, a five-year-old startup specializing in helping businesses interact with customers online.

Facebook has been steadily weaving e-commerce into offerings, particularly its WhatsApp and Messenger messaging services. The Kustomer platform provides software tools to help business representatives better tend to customer queries or concerns.

For those who are doing last-minute buys, Whatsapp is now another avenue for you to find just the right gift.

Source: AFP Relax News