{"id":7504,"date":"2017-07-20T13:45:25","date_gmt":"2017-07-20T13:45:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/rsoftsolution.com\/blog\/viber-acquires-chatter-commerce-the-startup-behind-its-shopping-keyboard.html"},"modified":"2017-07-20T13:45:25","modified_gmt":"2017-07-20T13:45:25","slug":"viber-acquires-chatter-commerce-the-startup-behind-its-shopping-keyboard","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rbsitsoftwaresolution.in\/blog\/viber-acquires-chatter-commerce-the-startup-behind-its-shopping-keyboard.html","title":{"rendered":"Viber acquires Chatter Commerce, the startup behind its shopping keyboard"},"content":{"rendered":"


\n<\/p>\n

Messaging app Viber<\/a>\u00a0earlier this year made its first foray into shopping services<\/a> with Instant Shopping, a feature that suggested items for sale based on your chats and a keyboard to help you navigate this. Today, the company is announcing some more e-commerce related news: it\u2019s buying the startup that helped build that feature.<\/p>\n

Viber has acquired Chatter Commerce<\/a>, maker of a service called ShopChat, which was the tech behind Instant Shopping. CEO and co-founder Zephrin Lasker once described ShopChat to me as \u201cthe world\u2019s first shopping keyboard.\u201d<\/p>\n

He also highlighted to me a special feature that\u2019s been developed into ShopChat, although I\u2019m not sure if Viber and Rakuten plan to promote this one: since you can download ShopChat as a keyboard app, in theory it means that Rakuten could use it to power shopping in any<\/em> messaging and chat app, not just Viber, provided people actually have the appetite to shop on messaging apps, and to use a keyboard and not a bot to do it.<\/p>\n

Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but Chatter Commerce already had a couple of ties to the company: not only were they already working with Viber, but it was backed by $1.25 million led by Rakuten<\/a>, the Japanese e-commerce giant that also owns Viber (which it purchased for $900 million<\/a> in 2014). It was a young startup, only exiting from stealth mode earlier this year.<\/p>\n

Viber said that Chatter Commerce\u2019s team of seven engineers, who are based out of San Francisco, are joining the company. Zephrin Lasker, Chatter Commerce\u2019s CEO and co-founder, will take a role as Viber\u2019s global head of e-commerce \u2014 a strong sign that the company wants and plans to do a lot more in this area going forward.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe founded Chatter Commerce on the basis that people should be able to do much more in their chats than what is currently available,\u201d said Lasker in a statement. \u201cRakuten Viber\u2019s innovative vision extends beyond the minor details of feature optimization that most messaging apps are focused on today their objective is to dramatically expand the role messaging apps have in people\u2019s everyday lives.\u201d<\/p>\n

The acquisition comes at an interesting time in the world of messaging.<\/p>\n

We\u2019ve reported in the last week that there are some strong signs we\u2019re seeing and hearing that Amazon is building a consumer-focused messaging app<\/a>. With Facebook also adding in more transactional features into Messenger \u2014 part of a huge expansion that has taken it beyond basic chat and into bots and other services \u2014 there is a clear trend among messaging apps to leverage engagement they already have with their users to drive their business in other ways.<\/p>\n

Facebook is coming at it from the social angle (although, with ex-PayPal exec David Marcus at the helm, you can argue that it too has some very strong commerce pedigree). And Amazon would come at it from the commerce angle \u2014 our sources say that one of the prime (geddit?) motivations behind it building a messaging service is to use it to help with its omni-sales strategy.<\/p>\n

Viber is somewhere in between these two: the company may have its roots as a pure-play messaging service, but ever since it was acquired by Rakuten \u2014 known as the Amazon of Japan \u2014 in 2014, I have been watching it to see when and how it would finally take the plunge into commerce.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s been a long time coming \u2014 three whole years \u2014 and feels a little like a defensive move, as if the company has been kicked into gear by opening moves from Facebook and others.<\/p>\n

My guess is that Viber\u2019s slow pace of development overall hasn\u2019t done it any favors.<\/p>\n

Viber stopped updating its metrics years ago and today simply describes its size as \u201c800+ million users\u201d, so it\u2019s hard to know how popular it is these days compared to WhatsApp and Messenger (both owned by Facebook) with 2 billion users between them; and the myriad of other popular messaging apps out there today, which include WeChat, Line, Kik, and so many more.<\/p>\n

And so, the move today could be an interesting sign of how the company, under new CEO Djamel\u00a0Agaoua, who joined earlier this year, is working hard to position itself as a serious player once again in the messaging space.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis investment is a new step in our journey to transform Viber into a multi-service communication platform,\u201d said Agaoua. \u201cWe want to bring more value to our hundreds of millions of users around the world while keeping the experience simple and seamless. Chatter Commerce\u2019s technology will actively support our vision, and their team is a perfect fit for our culture of innovation.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Article source: http:\/\/feedproxy.google.com\/~r\/techcrunch\/social\/~3\/vgwepZFRjgw\/<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Messaging app Viber\u00a0earlier this year made its first foray into shopping services with Instant Shopping, a feature that suggested items for sale based on your chats and a keyboard to <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3],"tags":[10,7,14,15,6,12,11],"class_list":["post-7504","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-latest-update","tag-computer-news","tag-downloads","tag-microsoft-download-news","tag-networking-updates","tag-technology-update","tag-wordpress-plugin-download","tag-wordpress-theme-download"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t