WhatsApp testing business features for its app

Verified profiles; to give businesses an official presence,   a verified profile option will be available so people can distinguish between real businesses and copycats. This will be done through a free ‘WhatsApp Business app for small companies and an enterprise solution for bigger companies operating at a large scale with a global base of customers, like airlines, e-commerce sites, and banks’. The app will be useful for product and service updates and notifications from businesses to consumers.

Over 1 billion people use WhatsApp every day to stay connected with their family and friends, and over time, more people are using the app to communicate with businesses they care about too. – WhatsApp

If you see a green badge like this next to a contact’s name, then its  a verified WhatsApp business account. To stop a business from account, you simply have to block them. To test the free business tools you can take this survey here.

Whether someone is communicating with a business around the corner or around the globe, people expect WhatsApp to be fast, reliable, and secure. We’ll be listening carefully to feedback during our test phase and keeping people informed as we make these tools more widely available. It’s important that we get this right and are thoughtful about the new experiences we’ll provide for businesses and our users – WhatsApp

WhatsApp has never really had an income generating model but it looks like this will be the first step to do it, as we shared in March here.