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Facebook dives deeper into "social commerce" with a $1B customer service purchase

Tuesday, December 1, 2020 by Snacks
_The one channel Kustomer can't track you on_

The one channel Kustomer can't track you on

Try funky spelling... for that Unicorn Status. Facebook is buying customer service startup Kustomer, reportedly for more than $1B. Kustomer unifies customer interactions from multiple channels to give support reps a full picture. Think: "Cindy sent four Insta DMs, three chatbot messages, and 10 emails today — send her an apology gift card." FB already uses Kustomer to help businesses aggregate customer Qs from Messenger and Instagram.

WhatsInstaBook... Kustomer's all-in-one customer relationship service perfectly fits FB’s social ecommerce mega-app ambitions. FB has been pushing to integrate messaging and payments across its "family of apps" (FB, Insta, WhatsApp, Messenger). This acquisition could further its goal of becoming the "social commerce" platform (Zuck's words).

  • Shop: In May, Facebook intro’d “Shops," letting businesses set up digital storefronts across FB/Instagram.
  • Pay: In August, Facebook unified its payment tools under “Facebook Financial” and announced plans to integrate messaging across apps.
  • Support: Now, Facebook wants to offer Kustomer's platform as a perk to lure and lock in businesses.
THE TAKEAWAY

The "next billion" could be businesses... Facebook has 2.5B users — it's betting that its next billion will come from businesses. 200M businesses use FB, but now it's investing big to reach Amazon-level ecommerce status. Businesses can boost users’ time spent and ad sales (a big deal for FB, which is almost 100% ad-reliant). But they also give FB a non-ad revenue stream: FB gets a cut of each sale made on its apps. It's even starting to charge for WhatsApp Business services.

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