Line wants businesses of all sizes to open stores in its messaging app

Line Corp CEO Takeshi Idezawa outlines the main theme.

Line is five years old this year. To celebrate, the Japan-based messaging app company today unveiled a new vision at Line Conference Tokyo 2016.

Line Corp CEO Takeshi Idezawa revealed that Line will become a more open service, focusing on “closing the distance” between businesses and customers. That means a massive new focus on mobile shopping.

Also coming soon to Line: a coupon book, digital rewards cards, and in-app commerce functions.

Until now, Line’s APIs have only been open to a limited number of large corporations who use the messaging app – which has 215 million monthly active users (MAUs) – to reach consumers. Beginning soon, Line wants to be a single entry point or “portal” for multiple services that huge brands as well as businesses of all sizes can build into their official Line accounts.

This emulates the approach taken by Tencent’s WeChat in China, which is used by brands, media outlets, celebrities, and small companies to sell online, push promotional information, offer vouchers, provide customer support, and a number of other things.

Here come the chatbots

One of the new features in Line will be an auto login so users can move from Line to non-related services without the need to re-login. Users in Japan can also complete payments to businesses through Line Pay. The service will be available to companies for a monthly fee of US$177 for official Line accounts with up to 100,000 registered customers.

Outside the venue today in Chiba, Japan.

Line is also opening up artificial intelligence – like chat bots – for businesses.

Other new functions aimed at brands serving customers within Line will include a coupon book, digital rewards cards, and in-app commerce functions. Businesses will be able to have stores within Line and accept payments. Companies using this face a 4.98 percent transaction fee.

These features will accompany the new company account pages to be released next month. With those, Line users can check store profiles, make restaurant reservations, see any coupons up for grabs, and also write reviews.

In order to make the Line business platform more approachable for companies of all sizes, Line Corp will also open the messaging API to connect things like in-store beacons (that can alert shoppers to deals) and artificial intelligence for businesses (such as for automated customer support chats).