Years after developing, WhatsApp finally announced its first major commercial API service to let businesses communicate with their customers in a formal way.
The service charges businesses on a per-message basis, with the first 1,000 messages free per month. It lets businesses and developers create custom dashboards, ith the basic one coming with required analytics and trackers. Meta says this Cloud-based API is aimed at all types of businesses around the world.
WhatsApp Business Cloud API
For a long, WhatsApp has only been offered free to users all around the world. But we also expected that the platform would sometime come up with some commercial plan to make it survive. In this pursuit, Meta’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg announced a new Cloud API for WhatsApp businesses.
“They’re reaching out for help to find products and services and to buy anything from big-ticket items to everyday goods. And today … we are opening WhatsApp to any business of any size around the world with WhatsApp Cloud API.”
He further stated that over a billion people use WhatsApp to reach their favorite businesses every week, thus offering a commercial product to the businesses to serve them better is reasonable.
This new API will reduce WhatsApp’s integration into business systems from weeks to just a few minutes, making it a viable solution. This solution features multiple devices support to be used simultaneously, and analytics on the products and conversations made with clients.
Zuckerberg said any business or developer can build a custom dashboard on top of WhatsApp’s native software to “customize their experience and speed up their response time to customers”.
Although, the basic dashboard gives businesses enough details of their transactions, like the current account limits, recent product news, and access to main account tools like the insights, messages, templates, phone numbers, and product catalog.
This API is free for the first 1,000 messages per month, and upping the limit asks you to purchase a commercial plan. Charging on a per-messages basis, the price varies from just a cent to 20 cents, depending on whether the conversations are initiated by business or user, and also the region.
