Coverage: Facebook makes messenger business oriented

After splitting the messenger app from it’s main app last year, Facebook is looking to earn some money from it. It also opened up the app to developers and announced last week that it is going to enable payments as well.

Ryan Mac had these details in his story for Forbes about how companies will be able to interact directly with consumers:

Facebook has courted businesses for years, urging them to join the platform and to spend ad dollars on the social network. Now, it wants to insert itself between businesses and their customers and stake its claim on the future of e-commerce.

On Wednesday, Facebook announced it was launching “Businesses on Messenger,” a set of new services that will allow companies to interact individually with customers through Facebook’s messenger app. Part of a larger rollout of the Menlo Park, Calif.-based social network’s new platform strategy, Businesses on Messenger will potentially allow for a consumer to receive order notifications via instant message, or–even better–buy items directly through the messenger app.

Though it’s still early days, Facebook’s integration of business into Messenger could be the company’s ticket into the wider world of online retail. By seizing on a strategy that’s long been employed by mobile messaging apps like Line and WeChat, Messenger, which has which has more than 600 million active users, will hope to improve on its parent company’s earlier e-commerce efforts, which have featured haphazard products like the “Buy” button launched last year.

A Quartz story by Alice Truong had these details on how it would work:

Messenger Business: Integrating Messenger with businesses such as online retailers will provide a direct channel for communicating with customers in real time. In a demo, Marcus walked through the process: At an online retailer’s checkout page, a shopper would see an option to receive shipping notifications and receipts over Messenger. If it’s accepted, Facebook would match the user’s profile to the order. (Yes, this means Facebook would be able to connect shoppers’ identities to their purchases.) Because all communications—receipts, shipping, customer support—would occur in a single thread, the retailer would be able to streamline any changes to the orders, and customers would be able to make additional purchases directly through the app by hitting a big, blue, thumbs-up button on Messenger.

The New York Times story by Vindu Goel reported that the move could bring Facebook closer to other apps like Asia’s WeChat, which offer services and that opening the app to developers could help start-ups:

That contrasts with the big American players in messaging, which besides Facebook include Apple with its iMessage, Google with Hangouts and Microsoft with Skype, which have done little to move beyond video conversations.

“All of these things are essentially free, and there’s no business model around them today,” said Jan Dawson, head of Jackdaw Research.

Mr. Dawson said that Messenger had the potential to evolve into a useful tool for businesses. “What Facebook Messenger could be is a platform that would allow you to start with chat and escalate to audio or video conversations. Someone already has their identity set up,” he said.

To do that, Facebook wants to entice developers to integrate their apps with the service.

Matt Serletic, chief executive of Zya, which rushed to finish its music app Ditty for a debut on stage as part of Wednesday’s announcements, said that Facebook made it easier for a small start-up like Zya to get an app off the ground. His team could focus on building its technology for converting text messages into songs, and simply plug in to Messenger’s technology for people to share the tunes.

“As a start-up developer, there is a lot of risk in whatever you do,” he said in an interview. “This shortens the time to actually get to scale and engage a large user base.”

TechCrunch’s Jon Russell wrote that the move helped make sense of Facebook’s purchase of WhatsApp:

If Facebook didn’t have Messenger — or WhatsApp had remained independent — there would be pressure to introduce games, business-consumer messaging or other features that are money spinners in Asia and way more lucrative than WhatsApp’s $1 per year subscription. (Though, for what it’s worth, I’ve not paid a cent for my three years using it.)

However, with Messenger adopting the platform approach and offering a more interactive experience, WhatsApp can be its antithesis and focus on basic communication.

There’s an argument that Facebook will bring WhatsApp under the Messenger Platform umbrella over time, which is easy to say when you consider that the service has 700 million monthly active users. But there’s likely a vast overlap between that user base and the 600 million that Facebook says use Messenger; duplicating features across the two would make no sense.

There’s also a strong case to offer a simplified chat app option. WhatsApp’s core strength is its ease of use. There needs to be a channel for users like my mum who don’t want bells and whistles, or those using low-end devices or spotty mobile internet connections.

Yes, WhatsApp may not make the kind of revenue per user as Messenger if it stays simple, but I’m willing to bet that Facebook is happier to have it as a differentiated experience that keeps non-Messenger users inside the Facebook ecosystem in some form. That’s better than losing them to a rival service. Besides, more subtle monetization options may be forthcoming for WhatsApp in the future.

Facebook will own all of our information. It’s just a matter of time. Brands are likely to pay a premium to have a better window into their customers and direct access to their most personal devices – their phones. The strategy is genius, and it’s only a matter of time before Facebook will own everything.