WhatsApp Business changes rates for messages to reduce marketing spam

WhatsApp Business is changing its per-conversation rates for businesses—a conversation is a 24-hour thread between sellers and users. The company is reducing rates for utility messages and raising rates for marketing messages.

Meta charges companies based on four types of messages: marketing (coupons, new items), utility (order updates, account balance), authentication (passwords that are unique), and service (questions from customers).

September 4th is when the new marketing conversation prices go into effect, and August 4th is when the new utility rates go into force. With WhatsApp charging per category now rather than a fixed charge for every discussion, this is the first update on conversation prices.

In other nations, the firm levies different fees to retailers. Marketing rates in India, for instance, are changing from $0.0099 to $0.0107 (+8%), whereas utility conversation rates are decreasing from $0.0042 to $0.0014 (-67%).

Businesses are probably going to be persuaded by this to use WhatsApp as their main customer service channel.
Users have voiced complaints over the past year regarding an increase in WhatsApp messages, which they claim is causing spam on the app. To safeguard users against this spam, the corporation has gradually installed barriers.

Meta announced following the test phase that it had globalised these standards last month.

“People use WhatsApp for a variety of purposes, such as receiving offers for holiday sales, boarding pass requests, and product questions. A Meta representative told TechCrunch in a statement that “there can be too much of a good thing. We’re working to find the right combination of tools to get this right so people continue to have a great experience messaging businesses on WhatsApp.”

These days, WhatsApp Business makes a significant financial contribution to Meta. It was reported by the company last year that the number of WhatsApp Business subscribers exceeded 200 million.