WhatsApp users in Brazil can now officially pay small businesses for goods and services from the Meta-owned messaging app, the company has announced. The merchant payments feature is available now to a “small number of businesses” but will roll out more widely in the coming months, allowing customers to make purchases with credit, debit, or prepaid Mastercard or Visa cards “without having to go to a website, open another app, or pay in person.”
TechCrunch reports that businesses were previously able to accept payments through WhatsApp by using third-party payment services, but now the messaging service offers the payment functionality directly.
Paid services like this are important to WhatsApp, as it is increasingly being presented as a way to message and interact with businesses, as well as simply communicate with friends and family. It’s a launch that shares many similarities with Tencent’s WeChat, the Chinese service that has been described as the “app for everything” which offers social networking and payment features in addition to instant messaging.
