Facebook announces its eCommerce push on WhatsApp

A tech giant company Facebook has been growing its focus on the eCommerce platform and recently announced a range of new shopping and discovery tools in the Facebook marketplace as well as the shopping experience on WhatsApp along with visual product search option on Instagram. 

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in a live stream noted that Facebook and Instagram Shops now see over 300 million visitors per month and more than 1.2 million monthly active Shops on its platforms and soon we will see this business growing with a launch of shops on WhatsApp. 

"We're bringing Shops to WhatsApp which will make it easier for people to find the products or brands that they want to engage with."

WhatsApp is the most used app in the world by majority of the people and thus the business can see a huge revenue profit. With the growing digital markets in India, Facebook has been working to build more business tools into the app, and to broaden its usage, and make it the key facilitator of more types of connection, and transactions, in the Indian market. 

"We’ll continue to support economic recovery by making further investments in Shops and waiving fees for business sellers through June 2022," said the company.

The company also said that they will soon offer new, personalized Shop ads, which will display items based on people's individual shopping preferences, interests and past behaviors.

"We're launching the ability for a business to send shoppers to where you're going to be most likely to make a purchase based on your shopping behavior."

This will help the users to directly connect with the shops that they have showed interest in.

Facebook is also adding a visual search on Instagram search powered by AI. Visual search helps people find similar products just by tapping.

As noted by the company, "A lot of shopping discovery begins with visual discovery, right, so you see something that you think is awesome. And then, you know, maybe you want to see other products that are like that, or you want to figure out how to get that product. And this is the type of problem that AI can really help out with. [So] one of the things we're going to do is when you're on Instagram...We're getting ready to start rolling out experience and testing an experience that we're calling visual search."

A range of brands and social media networks will see a huge jump and with the AR product catalogues in ads it will automatically show relevant products to people based on their interests.