Facebook has courted businesses for years, urging them to join the platform and to spend ad dollars on the social network. Now, it wants to insert itself between businesses and their customers and stake its claim on the future of e-commerce.
On Wednesday, Facebook announced it was launching "Businesses on Messenger," a set of new services that will allow companies to interact individually with customers through Facebook's messenger app. Part of a larger rollout of the Menlo Park, Calif.-based social network's new platform strategy, Businesses on Messenger will potentially allow for a consumer to receive order notifications via instant message, or--even better--buy items directly through the messenger app.
Though it's still early days, Facebook's integration of business into Messenger could be the company's ticket into the wider world of online retail. By seizing on a strategy that's long been employed by mobile messaging apps like Line and WeChat, Messenger, which has which has more than 600 million active users, will hope to improve on its parent company's earlier e-commerce efforts, which have featured haphazard products like the "Buy" button launched last year.
"Our customers are passionate advocates of our brand, and we have developed an emotional connection with them," said Dave Atchison, senior vice president of marketing at Zulily, one of only two retail partners to experiment with Facebook's new business service. "We’re excited to be one of the first retailers to partner with Facebook to utilize Messenger as a platform to communicate with our customers especially since the majority of our North American orders are placed on mobile.”
In a demonstration at San Francisco's Fort Mason for his company's F8 conference, David Marcus, the former
"That's pretty inconvenient on a desktop," he said, "and barely usable on mobile."
Marcus then showed how he could buy a shirt from retailer Everlane, Facebook's second retail partner on this effort, receive a confirmation and even modify his order, all within Messenger. In the trial, Facebook provided the communications backend while Everlane maintained control of all purchasing and processing of the order. According to sources, Facebook will not take any cut or receive any referral fees for transactions made through messenger and the service will be completely free for businesses for now.
It's unclear when this set of services will be available to all businesses (Facebook is currently taking signups) and it could be months before even Zulily and Everlane's sites have full functionality with Businesses on Messenger. But it's an interesting first step. In an age where the buzzphrase of "online-to-offline" has business owners scrambling to try any app or service that will bring them more customers, the Messenger integration could be a boon. Facebook certainly has the users and as it unrolls its recently announced peer-to-peer payments service, it will soon have a valuable repository of payment credentials. Imagine messaging a business that you wanted to buy a pair of jeans, and having that order immediately processed and confirmed with an emoji.
That scenario is a long way off (Facebook's payment service will strictly be person-to-person as it rolls out in the U.S.), but it's fun to consider and as Facebook spreads its tentacles into a new area, potential rivals like
