When you browse photos of your high school lab partner’s dog, Facebook makes shopping easier. Yes, the Instagram store and Facebook market are already prominently displayed in the lower navigation tab of the app.
But now, you can also shop on WhatsApp and other updates. Today, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced three e-commerce updates for Facebook products in the live audio room: stores on WhatsApp and Marketplace, store announcements, and Instagram visual search.
“More than 1 billion people use the Marketplace every month, so we make it easier for businesses to bring their stores to the Marketplace to attract more people,” Zuckerberg wrote in a Facebook post.
When customers view the store on WhatsApp, they can choose to chat with the merchant before making a purchase. At the F8 conference earlier this month, Facebook revealed an update to WhatsApp for Business; previously, it might take weeks to start a business Account, but now, businesses can register in just a few minutes.
Although WhatsApp has more than 2 billion global users, only about 175 million people use WhatsApp Business accounts to send messages every day to provide customer support and other services.
Given that Facebook has been promoting e-commerce on platforms such as Instagram, it makes sense for this move to also extend to WhatsApp. The deployment of the WhatsApp store is about to begin, and now stores in the United States can obtain inventory in the Marketplace store through on-site payment.
The next feature is store advertising, which aims to provide a more personalized shopping experience based on people’s personal shopping habits. Zuckerberg said: “We are launching a feature that will allow the company to send buyers to the place where they are most likely to buy based on their buying behavior”.
As of now, AR dynamic advertising has been launched in the United States-Huda Beauty Companies such as Laura Mercier and Laura Mercier are using these ads to let customers try out AR lipstick shades before buying.
These augmented reality trial experiences are available through API integration with Modiface and Perfect Corp. Earlier this year, Pinterest partnered with ModiFace to launch a trial version of augmented reality eyeshadow.
On Instagram, a visual search function based on artificial intelligence will be launched for testing in the next few months.
“A lot of shopping discoveries start with visual discovery, right? Then you will see something that you think is great. Then, you know, maybe you want to see other similar products, or you want to learn how to get these Products,” Zuckerberg explained.And this is the problem that artificial intelligence can really help to solve.”
With this artificial intelligence, people will be able to upload their own photos, even those photos that haven’t been posted on Instagram can also find similar elements.
Facebook is not the first company to use this technology. For example, see Cadeera, Where Search, or Stye.ai. But introducing this technology to major platforms may change the way we shop, which seems to be Facebook’s current goal.