Making It Easier for Businesses of All Sizes To Get Started on WhatsApp

For people and businesses globally, WhatsApp is now where business gets done. Whether it’s a mom-and-pop shop or a Fortune 500 company, businesses of all sizes today rely on WhatsApp to help their customers.

In the same way that WhatsApp made it possible for loved ones to communicate freely across borders, we want to make the challenges we’ve all experienced when talking to businesses a thing of the past. That means no more waiting on hold, getting stuck on a broken website, or sending an email into a black box wondering if it will ever be read.

To date, we’ve helped millions of businesses do better with WhatsApp. The next step is making WhatsApp available for every business that wants a fast, convenient and reliable way to communicate with their customers.

Opening WhatsApp to All Businesses and Developers with a New Cloud-based API

Today we’re taking a significant step in making WhatsApp available for any business of any size across the world by offering free, secure cloud hosting services provided by Meta. With this new API, we’ve cut down start-up time from months to minutes so businesses and developers can quickly and easily access our service, build directly on top of WhatsApp to further customize their experience and increase the speed at which they can respond to their customers. These services will also eliminate costly server expenses for our partners and give them instant access to new features. Businesses can sign up directly or work with one of our business solution providers to get started.

New Features in the WhatsApp Business App for Fast-growing Businesses

Over the years we’ve seen how small businesses that use WhatsApp will grow and we want to support them with additional tools. We expect some will want to use the Cloud-based API though many will continue to use the WhatsApp Business app. We are also working on advanced features for these businesses to help them run their operations beyond just a few people and further amplify their brand online – like the ability to manage chats across up to 10 devices so they can better handle an influx of chats. We’ll also provide new customizable WhatsApp click-to-chat links to help businesses attract customers across their online presence. We plan to offer these as additional, optional features for a fee in the WhatsApp Business app as part of a new premium service. We’ll have more details to share in the future.

With these new ways to support businesses, our values for person-to-business conversations still have not changed. People are in control of the businesses they chat with and businesses cannot message people unless they have requested to be contacted.

We hope people enjoy the ability to chat with more of their favorite businesses on WhatsApp and can’t wait to hear how new businesses get built, grow and thrive.