Facebook Messenger an eCommerce Development Strategy

Following Facebook strategy it appears that it is about to announce new features particularly in its Facebook Messenger 

The development stage for an in-store mobile payment capability.

According to The Information, following a source code analysis of the iPhone Facebook Messenger app it can be seen and noted commands such as "pay in person" and "pay directly in Messenger when you pick up the item"  therefore it can be deduced that Facebook Messenger can have in-built the capability for in-store purchasing features. Nevertheless, Facebook was not yet responded to this new feature which is most likely in a development stage. 

Furthermore, it is already possible send money to a friend via Facebook Messenger, however the iOS app code implies that Facebook will most likely expand Facebook Messenger features and capabilities as a payment tool. This follows a similar pattern in the peer-to-peer payment feature was also predicted months ahead of official release with an analysis of the app's code, which Engadget reported.

This is despite what Mark Zuckerberg said, that Facebook was not planning to launch its own payment product. However,  Apple Pay was mentioned as a potential partner (transcript provided by Seeking Alpha is can be read below):

On payments, the basic strategy that we have is to make it especially in products like Messenger that where the business interaction maybe a bit more transactional, to take all the friction out of making the transactions that you need. So, we don’t view ourselves as a payments business, that’s not the type of company that we are. We’ll partner with everyone who does payment. We look at the stuff that Apple is doing with Apple Pay for example as a really neat innovation in the space that takes a lot of friction out of transactions as well. And our view is that the less friction, the better the user experience, the more people can easily interact with businesses that they care about. And ultimately for our business that will drive up the amount that businesses are willing to pay to advertise to send people into those interactions because they perform well. So it’s good for everyone but that’s how we think about that.

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Intuit Acquires Technology Patents from Payvment that is Closing Down

Intuit is currently in the process of acquiring Payvment, and it plans to add directly the technical staff, technology, and patents to its Intuit team, assets and portfolio. The potential for Intuit is that it may have a strategy to utilize its customer base and offer them new capabilities in terms of offering Facebook ads for businesses digital marketing campaigns.

This development follows on the news that the specialist Facebook e-commerce Payvment, has today announced on its website that is closing down.  It also follows that the current Payvment e-commerce merchants (200,000), are being automatically transferred to Ecwid. 

Payvment CEO Jim Stoneham stated: “The story from our side is quite simple – we have built an amazing team and have broken a lot of new ground around using social and commerce ‘big data’ to empower SMBs – and another company who knows our work and team decided he were a great fit to help them more rapidly achieve their objectives in social and big data,” This company did not intend to directly continue our current business, so we talked to a number of top-notch commerce platform companies and ultimately partnered with Ecwid to ensure our large base of SMB sellers can keep moving forward.”

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