WhatsApp Business is the Facebook-owned company’s business-facing app, helping businesses stay in touch with their users in a more direct way, i.e., directly in their WhatsApp chats. The company has been steadily adding features to the app, and the latest addition is one that should help small and medium sized businesses quite a bit.
WhatsApp has now added a catalog feature to its Business app. With this feature, businesses will be able to create a catalog of their products and services and showcase them to users. It also certainly looks like users will soon be able to buy a business’ product directly from within WhatsApp using the catalog.
“Like Agradaya, a sustainable herbs and spices business in Indonesia. We gave the founder Andhika Mahardika early access to the catalog feature, and he told us that it makes it easier for customers to learn about their products, know the prices and view the images of what they offer — which is essential for serving their customers better” said the company speaking about the new feature.
Businesses will be able to add important information such as prices, descriptions, and product codes for each of the products they put in their catalog, allowing users to get a good idea about the product they are looking at before making a purchasing decision. This should also prove really helpful to SMBs which might not have a website to showcase their products or enable online sales. These businesses can now use WhatsApp’s catalog feature to create sort-of an online portal that users can explore and make purchases from.
The feature has been made available in Brazil, Germany, India, Indonesia, Mexico, the U.K. and the U.S, on both Android and iOS. It’s also expected to roll out to other regions soon.
