Besides making bots more powerful, Marcus stressed that the ability to accept payments in Messenger will increase companies’ revenue.
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Businesses will be able to sell directly to consumers via their Facebook Messenger application.
This is not the first time Facebook has allowed money to be transferred via Messenger, as the app has already supported small-scale payments between individual users.
Meanwhile, to drive more commerce to Messenger, Facebook is rolling out ads in News Feed that drive users to chat bots on Messenger.
The confirmation comes from David Marcus, who is the head of Messenger at Facebook, during his talk onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2016.
Facebook is reportedly working with major financial entities including PayPal, Stripe, Visa, MasterCard, American Express, and others to build out the payments feature. “… Moving forward, we are also simplifying the payment and checkout experience in order to reduce the overall friction between wanting something and getting it”.
With this new functionality, consumers will be able to make payments without leaving Messenger. The new changes, introduced today as part of Messenger Platform v1.2, mean you never have to leave the app to make a payment.
Interested US firms are being invited to apply for a closed beta ahead of a wider rollout.
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Marcus dismissed the notion that bots are a fad, and said Facebook is committed to making sure they eventually live up to the hype. These bots will send and receive text, but also add images, emoji, and other rich content such as product carousels to let users browser merchandise options from a retailer, for example. “Can you bring your daily life on Messenger in a more organised way, and actually have the best high quality, high fidelity interactions with people, groups of people, businesses, services and give an opportunity for developers to build a presence on a new platform and get distribution and adoption”.
