A test is underway in Brazil to create a list of shops and services at your disposal divided by categories. A re-edition of the old paper catalog in digital version
Facebook intends to squeeze Whatsapp to the maximum , transforming it into its reference app for local stores. The project is clear: Instagram is for multinationals and influencers, Facebook is for keeping in touch with friends, while Whatsapp, in addition to letting you chat with friends and relatives, can be used to ask the time of your favorite jewelry or fix the bread and milk from the neighborhood grocery store. Soon, however, a corporate directory will be added to this idea of an aggregate shopping center that will allow you to find shops and services on the app , even if you don’t know the phone number. In short, onere-edition of the dear old Yellow Pages, but in digital format . To announce it is Mark Zuckerberg himself , who has formalized the green light from his Facebook profile: it will start from Sao Paulo, Brazil with a first test phase that will solve any problems before exporting the functionality to the rest of the world.
The first screenshots of the new service indicate that companies will be divided into categories such as “pet shops”, “restaurants” and so on; It’s not out of this world to speculate that Facebook could sell priority to individual companies to appear at the top of the lists in the form of sponsorship. At that point, just choose the company you are interested in and start the chat . After the arrival of the Shopping button and payments within the application, the latter novelty represents the importance of the Business segment within Whatsapp, if you consider that more than 175 million people around the world use it to send messages to an account registered as a companyon Whatsapp Business. In Brazil and India you can also shop directly within the application, as well as be able to exchange money with friends and family.
A push towards e-commerce that was held back at the beginning of the year by the chaos that arose around the new privacy regulation . Born as a modification to allow companies to access your Facebook information, it was perceived as an indistinct gift of data to the blue social network, causing a huge loss of users. This is why Whatsapp has specified that the new Yellow Pages-style function will not record the position of users or businesses looking for with the directory.
