India will drive a lot of our innovations: WhatsApp India head

Almost two years after its launch, Whatsapp Business has helped over 80% of the business-owners increase their sales, said a top executive at the Facebook-owned company. 

Whatsapp Business, as the name suggests, allows business owners to share information about their venture with the customers and also communicate with them using the messaging tools provided by the platform.

This comes just a few weeks after Whatsapp Business introduced a new ‘catalogs’ feature which allows businesses to show and share their products and services to customers. It lets users browse photos, read the product description and look up prices, helping with better purchase decisions.  

India, with 400 million Whatsapp users is the biggest and one of the most important markets for the messaging app.

“India is our largest market and it will drive a lot of our innovations,” said Abhijit Bose, head of Whatsapp India, at an event in Bengaluru Razorpay FTX. “We are focused on expanding our merchant file so that businesses can use WhatsApp more.”

Bose said that they want to keep investing and adding features to bring more businesses online.

“We want to accelerate their growth by making a few tweaks and want to be a key part of digitising SMEs,” he added.

That said, providing a seamless payment experience will continue to be a problem for the messaging app. The company is not data localisation compliant, which will delay its foray into the Indian digital payments sector. A TOI report said earlier this month that the Reserve Bank of India had told the Supreme Court that Whatsapp is non-compliant with data localisation norms. 

WhatsApp has also been at the centre of a storm over recent hacking of its messaging app. The government had reached out to the central bank and the NPCI to discuss the safety features of these services.