05 October 2023

WhatsApp has expanded its fast-growing payment offering in its biggest market by launching an in-chat payments service for businesses in India.

The WhatsApp service already boasts hundreds of millions of users in India. Now they will be able to pay for products and services through the app.

Shoppers can buy products and services from businesses using credit and debit cards, WhatsApp Pay and India’s public digital payments network UPI. This new service also allows the platform to gather more data to help it target and personalise existing advertising. The recent passing of India’s data protection bill, which excludes rules on data sharing by companies, may support that objective.

This could massively boost WhatsApp’s chances of becoming one of the top digital payments apps in the country – but it’s also important to Meta as a way to further monetise its platforms. Companies are charged for delivering marketing or customer service messages to their customers via WhatsApp, and to run ads on Facebook or Instagram that take a potential customer directly into a WhatsApp chat with the company.