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There’s no escaping online shopping – not as long as Mark Zuckerberg (and Jeff Bezos) is around.

E-commerce features have been integrated into all of Facebook’s products, including Shops on Instagram and Marketplace on Facebook, which are already displayed prominently on the apps’ bottom navigation tabs.

Now there’ll be shopping integrated into the group’s popular WhatsApp messaging service soon, too.

That’s if you stuck with WhatsApp after the privacy update.

Whenever we are casually looking at our friends’ baby photos or our relatives’ questionable statuses, we’ll be constantly tempted by the option to shop right at our fingertips – which, might actually be a welcome respite.

Not to mention how these new features will be excellent for business.

Per BusinessTech, users will soon be able to view a shop on WhatsApp so that they can chat with a business before buying something, according to Zuckerberg’s announcement posted on June 22.

Here’s more from TechCrunch:

At the F8 conference earlier this month, Facebook revealed updates to WhatsApp for Business — previously, it could take weeks to set up a business account, but now, businesses can sign up in just a few minutes.

Though WhatsApp has more than 2 billion global users, only about 175 million people message with WhatsApp Business accounts daily for things like customer support.

Since Facebook has been pushing e-commerce on platforms like Instagram, it makes sense that this initiative will expand to WhatsApp too.

The group wants to improve how businesses communicate with their customers since more and more businesses use WhatsApp:

For example, businesses were often limited to sending timely notifications, which made it difficult to follow up with customers outside of a 24-hour window.

WhatsApp said it will now support more types of messages – to let people know when an item is back in stock, for example.

New messaging features will also be rolled out so that people can do business quicker.

This will include a menu of pre-written messages with up to 10 options so that a business owner doesn’t have to type out a response every time.

Plus, by going through a WhatsApp Business API account, a business can set up three quick reply options ahead of time.

Clearly, Facebook has one thing on their mind: money – not that small business owners should complain.

[sources:businesstech&techcrunch]