The announcement was made by Mark Zuckerberg at Conversations, the company's yearly business messaging event held in São Paulo.
WhatsApp has recently revealed the introduction of the Meta Verified initiative for WhatsApp Business customers in Brazil, India, Indonesia, and Colombia, as announced by WhatsApp in a blog post, to broaden the program to more nations later on.
The service provides subscription plans beginning at $14 per month and seeks to improve the messaging service for businesses by adding new features and enabling companies to use their APIs for in-app customer support calls. The program was first launched for creators in March 2023 and then extended to encompass businesses in September 2023.
Businesses will be granted a badge and safeguarded against impersonation upon submission of their business details to the company when they enroll in the program. They will also be able to use a verified WhatsApp channel for promoting their products and manage their WhatsApp Business account from different gadgets.
Users have the ability to create a customised website that includes details about their business, which they can then share with both clients and suppliers. WhatsApp has already rolled out some of these features with WhatsApp Premium, but has not revealed any pricing details yet.
At the moment, the company intends to impose fees on other companies for the service, but has not yet revealed any details about the prices. Businesses need to prioritise utilising the personalised messaging service to send various messages like coupon codes, information on new products, and birthday wishes to their customers.
Meta is developing a comprehensive toolkit for businesses to communicate with their customers, with more than 200 million monthly users of WhatsApp Business.
During the initial three months of 2024, Meta's CFO, Susan Li, reported a revenue of $380 million from its apps, mainly driven by the adoption of business messaging on WhatsApp.
Recently, Meta released a study in collaboration with Bain & Co, which suggested that conversation commerce in India has significant untapped potential, with only 200 million out of 650 million active social media and messaging platform users currently engaging in online shopping.
Image credits: Meta