Since last year, WhatsApp has been developing new tools to help people and businesses communicate with each other. App users – that is, almost all the citizens of the planet – in recent times have increasingly shown a desire to interact with companies, stressing that the chat is definitely a more practical, simple and fast method compared to the traditional phone call or sending an email, a method that is certainly formal and safe, but at the same time inconvenient for the average user who now lives with a smartphone in hand.

Hence the launch in January 2018 of WhatsApp Business, an instant messaging system dedicated to companies. So what are the operations that users will be able to perform to interact with them? You can find them in this article. It should be noted that in many cases it will be the company itself that allow a conversation to start through the “Click to Chat” button directly on the website or on a Facebook ad. In this way the user-customer will be able to request assistance in real time on WhatsApp.

But where's the news? Businesses will now have to pay to respond to their customers on Whatsapp. The American entrepreneur himself made this news public on his Facebook blog dedicated to business. To make it possible to use WhatsApp for a fee, Facebook has launched the API package that companies will have to use on their applications or websites in the sections that concern chat (to learn more about the API system, see this link).

The function can also be used to send only relevant messages and not promotional ones, such as – to return to the previous example – the confirmation of the shipment of a product or the issuing of a boarding pass. But From 2019, it should be possible for companies to place advertisements in statuses, an idea born to mirror what has already been happening for months in Instagram Stories, now used by more than 450 million people.

WhatsApp Business is becoming a paid service, but not for all companies: only those who are late in responding will pay. In fact, these will have at their disposal only 24 hours to satisfy the requests of the users-customers for free, after which the message sent will become subject to payment.

The cost – for now – remains a mystery, but indicatively will fluctuate between 1 and 9 cents. Uncertain price therefore, as well as the launch date of the new paid system. But in the next few weeks Facebook will launch a campaign to encourage users to communicate with companies via WhatsApp: what is certain in fact is precisely Zuckemberg's objective, that is to bring more and more companies to interact on WhatsApp.