WhatsApp Business, a new cloud-hosted version of the company’s API, is now available to all enterprises and developers, according to Meta. Premium capabilities, like as the option to establish a vanity URL for consumers to contact you, will be available to the messaging platform’s 50 million-plus small business app users.

WhatsApp now offers a paid membership option, but it’s just for companies. It will be a part of the WhatsApp for Business platform, to put it another way. After paying a charge, commercial users of the platform will have access to special features such as personalised URLs and a larger number of linked devices. We’ll wait to hear from the corporation on the WhatsApp premium price. However, you need also learn about WhatsApp Cloud API. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed Cloud API during the company’s first business messaging event, Conversations.

WhatsApp is also going to give sophisticated and optional options, like the possibility to claim a bespoke and personal short link, according to WhatsApp tracker WABetaInfo. WhatsApp Business customers with WhatsApp premium subscription plans now have access to additional services.

This feature will allow users to connect up to ten devices to the same account and will operate with the instant messaging platform’s multi-device connection. Businesses will be able to employ customised short link services through this service. According to WABetaInfo, the WhatsApp subscription plan would be optional and only available to companies. The functionality is currently in development, and no release date has been set yet.

Idema said the new platform will be something “whether you’re an individual developer working on your own entrepreneurial project or a smaller company.”

Idema said the new platform will be something “whether you’re an individual developer working on your own entrepreneurial project or a smaller company.” He said the new API means “partners can focus on building the tools and services they want to deliver to customers on top of WhatsApp,” while WhatsApp takes the installation, maintenance, and hosting of the API off their plate can.

The custom URL option being rolled out for business users is “very much like having a URL for your webpage or a name for your app,” according to Idema. He said that along with this, small businesses will also get multi-device capability, allowing multiple phones to manage the same WhatsApp number. It’s a feature that many small businesses have been asking us for for a long time, he added.

WhatsApp believes this is all part of a natural evolution, and users want the deal to be part of their messaging experience. Many insights came from India, one of the largest markets with over 400 million users. “Small business owners were already using WhatsApp, they put numbers in their stores, they asked customers to just send a message if they needed groceries,” he recalled, adding that they hadn’t developed the tools to make that conversation for businesses made easy .

“It started with the belief that this is what people wanted because we saw it using the app, and we slowly rolled out features to make that happen. We believe this is a natural part of what people want to do as part of WhatsApp. And just during the pandemic, we saw that it was incredibly useful,” he explained.

The custom URL feature will be a tool to promote their business on Facebook and Instagram with click-to-message ads, Idema explained.

But this was done to ensure people felt they were in control. “If the conversation is one they don’t want to have anymore, they can control that. We need to make sure we’re building systems to ensure the experience of speaking to a company remains of high quality,” he said, adding that companies also don’t want to denigrate the experience of speaking to them.

Most of the features are the result of what companies have asked for and what WhatsApp has seen using the services. “I remember meeting up with a lot of them in Mumbai and Delhi and they showed us that they take us into their stores and show us how to hire an extra person just to get all those WhatsApp messages to answer. And mostly it’s the same question or they send me a picture of it or what size it is,” Idema explained of how they started developing tools to just make it easier for the business owner to reply to frequently asked questions.

Idema said the new platform will be something “whether you’re an individual developer working on your own entrepreneurial project or a smaller company.”

Then came the next phase of the business, where “they wanted a profile that looked different than what a regular consumer app user might do.” This led to the introduction of company profiles, followed by catalogs that made it easier for companies to upload their product images and answer basic questions. “We just continued to listen to what small businesses in particular were asking of us and added those tools to the product. That’s one of the reasons we’re so excited about the premium offerings. These are like power tools for businesses that really run on WhatsApp.” The custom URL feature will be a tool to promote their business on Facebook and Instagram with click-to-message ads, Idema explained.

The ability to make payments within WhatsApp will also be an important part of this. “We’ve put so much time and energy into enabling payments on WhatsApp. You have a great conversation with a company that you decide to buy the product from and you just want it to be easy. They just want to type and pay digitally. And that’s the promise of UPI. We’re pretty happy we invested in it and really hope that if we make it available to businesses, it will be really valuable for consumers,” he said.

For Business, WhatsApp Multi-Device

Businesses may connect up to ten more devices to their WhatsApp account with this capability. This is advantageous for firms with large social media teams since it provides them with more ways to access corporate communications and communicate with customers.

Vanity URLs for WhatsApp

A vanity URL is a unique link that you may create and update every 90 days. You may share this “professional-looking” link with consumers so they can easily contact you. These vary from the commonly accessible short links for businesses in that you may customise the link text (like a username, but not exactly). It’s also necessary to have the link text.

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