Facebook-owned WhatsApp today expanded its popular WhatsApp Business app to the iPhone, giving business owners a better way to interface with their customers using the chat app.
With WhatsApp Business, businesses are able to create profiles with contact details, website information, and options for automated greetings, replies, and away messages.
Whether it's an online sweet shop in Ribeirão Preto, Brazil that closes 60 percent of its sales via WhatsApp Business or a cinnamon roll company in Tijuana, Mexico that credits WhatsApp Business for allowing it to open a second location, small business owners all over the world are using the app to grow. We're excited to bring the WhatsApp Business app to even more small businesses and hear new stories about how it's helping them succeed.
WhatsApp Business also includes a desktop website component, so businesses can use a smartphone, tablet, or desktop machine to contact customers. Prior to now, the WhatsApp Business app has been limited to Android devices.
WhatsApp Business will be available in the App Store for free, but it looks like it's still rolling out at the current time. It will be available in Brazil, Germany, Indonesia, India, Mexico, the UK and the United States, with WhatsApp planning to bring it to additional countries in the near future. [Direct Link]
Top Rated Comments
are people running their entire business on mobile phones? I can't stand to type a one sentence long text message to my mom and generally just go over to my Mac. Does WhatsApp have a desktop component these business owners can use or do they just spend all day mashing out garbage with their fingers? Just seems like this would be a real waste of time versus a traditional keyboard setup in a real web browser.
From the article:WhatsApp Business also includes a desktop website component, so businesses can use a smartphone, tablet, or desktop machine to contact customers.
If Apple is going full out on services, I hope they can figure out how to bring iMessage and FaceTime to Android and Windows. So much potential to use their reputation for privacy to disrupt messaging for businesses.
Does that bring revenue?