Note from the Publisher: Word's out that Facebook has upped their Messenger offering with a new chatbot platform that enables businessses (many of them financial) to sell directly within the Messenger platform without ever leaving the app. This is of course a great feature for several reasons. First, every time you add a step to an online sales process, you experience increased attrition and loss of sales. Second, by keeping users on the Facebook Messenger site, they don't experience a "bounce" off the site, and thus the users stay longer on Facebook. A bounce is when a user leaves a site, and web publishers want to keep bounces to a minimum. The longer a user stays on the site, the better their web analytics look to media buyers. So all in all, this is an incredibly smart move on their part, and no doubt will drive additional fee-based revenue for Facebook as well. They are very smart people over there.
"Facebook is taking its recently launched Messenger chatbot platform to the next level, letting bots accept payments without having to send users to external sites.
Since the Messenger platform's launch just six months ago, developers and businesses - many of them in financial services - have built over 30,000 bots for it.
Now the platform's first update sees businesses able to sell products and services directly to customers within Messenger. Users will be able to checkout with a few clicks without ever having to leave the app."
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