Facebook’s WeChat-ification

Facebook, meet your mentor. Image credit: Tech in Asia.

Facebook users will soon be able to buy goods directly within the social network’s app, a new feature that will be rolled out alongside friend-to-friend money transfers and ticket buying.

A few months ago, we analyzed Facebook Messenger’s product roadmap and how it was essentially a bid to turn the service into a “giant WeChat clone” – and with these new features, it shows that the transformation is in full swing.

Playing catchup

WeChat, the Chinese messenger-cum-ecommerce platform, has spent the past three years rewriting the rules for how social networks can expand and make money from their users. Now it’s clear that Facebook has been paying attention.

While Facebook has focused on making money from users via targeted advertisements, WeChat has welcomed companies en masse to its network for online shopping, in-store cashless payments, money transfers, personal fund investments, and essentially everything in between.

See: The amazing ways WeChat is used in China

From a user interface and usability perspective, the Chinese app has tackled ecommerce in two ways. First, through its WeChat Wallet feature, which features a select number of ecommerce and payments options that run as web apps, and whose content is largely dictated by the companies that Tencent (WeChat’s parent company) has partnerships with. The second method is through company-specific pages which function similarly to a user’s friends (i.e. they are on your contact list) which can be run by almost any company, and which can take advantage of WeChat’s integrated payments infrastructure.

Different, yet the same

Facebook has taken a slightly different approach, but it’s certainly not far removed from WeChat’s offerings. At yesterday’s F8 Facebook developer conference, Zuckerberg announced that the company is banking on an army of AI-powered bots to tackle ecommerce.

“We think you should just be able to message a business, the same way you message a friend,” he said during a presentation. “And you shouldn’t have to install a new app.”

“To order flowers on 1-800-Flowers, you never have to call 1-800-Flowers again,” Zuckerberg added.

Zuck’s dream seems to be to pivot Facebook into an ecommerce powerhouse. According to Facebook’s blog, bots can be used in everything from ecommerce to weather and traffic updates, to shipping notifications.

These bots are essentially a more refined version of WeChat’s company pages – a similar approach, but with a much stronger emphasis on artificial intelligence. While WeChat companies can give automated replies to simple commands – for example, messaging “menu” to a restaurant’s account may provide you with a list of food and prices – it doesn’t rely on natural language processing.

The idea is to turn Facebook into an ecommerce powerhouse.

And similarly to the offerings within WeChat’s mobile wallet, Facebook also announced an assortment of company-specific ecommerce features to be rolled out on the social network, including a partnership with Ticketmaster, which will allow users to buy movie, concert, and show tickets without leaving the social network. This function will not be offered via the chat interface, but rather on particular events’ Facebook pages.