Last week in our weekly brief we told you of plans by Facebook to venture into the payments business. Facebook plans to venture into the payment space with a peer to peer payment service which allows users to send money to one another through the Facebook messenger application. That was one of the new ventures with messenger.
During its annual developer event F8, Facebook announced that it was working towards making the application crucial for business. The plan is to use the platform as a customer service tool. In line with this, Facebook announced partnership with two shopping sites for the service. The two sites will be able to send receipts and shipping updates via Messenger. There are also plans to use messenger to add an item to an existing order that was originally placed on the retailer’s own site.
The venture into e-commerce marks is one of the bets Facebook has on turning messenger into a unified communication tool. There are also plans to allow messenger buy stickers as with other apps such as Line and Wechat. This is interesting for Facebook as it tries to have developers build specific tools for the messenger platform.
Other news from the developers conference includes the launch of the mobile ad exchange which basically allows publishers to fill vacant ad space by allowing advertisers to bid on that space in real-time competiting directly with Google and Twitter. Facebook also announced a tool called analytics for apps that allows developers see almost all the activity within their app. This is on top of reports of them planning to get publishers to publish straight to Facebook and sharing revenues from the ads placed on the side.
