On Tuesday (November 12), Facebook announced the launch of “Facebook Pay”, which will simply payments across Facebook’s four social media platforms, i.e. Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp.
Deborah Liu, Facebook’s Vice President of Marketplace & Commerce, said that although people “already use payments across our apps to shop, donate to causes and send money to each other,” Facebook wants to have a simpler, though still secure, payment mechanism, and that is why it was introducing Facebook Pay.
She goes on to say that once you have set up a payment method (e.g. one of your debit cards) in Facebook Pay, then you do not need to re-enter its details every time that you wish to make a payment:
Facebook Pay supports most major credit and debit cards as well as PayPal. Payments are processed in partnership with companies like PayPal, Stripe and others around the world. Facebook Pay is built on existing financial infrastructure and partnerships, and is separate from the Calibra wallet which will run on the Libra network.
You can choose to either enable Facebook Pay on an “app-by-app” basis or ask that it be enabled across all of Facebook’s platforms.
Features of Facebook Pay include payment history and real-time customer support via live chat.
Facebook Pay is initially (this week) being made available on Facebook and Messenger in the U.S., but the plan is to offer it across all four of it its apps; also, support for other jurisdictions is coming in the future.
Liu finishes by saying:
Facebook Pay is part of our ongoing work to make commerce more convenient, accessible and secure for people on our apps. And in doing so, we believe we can help businesses grow and empower people everywhere to buy and sell things online. We’ll continue to develop Facebook Pay and look for ways to make it even more valuable for people on our apps.
Featured Image From Facebook’s F8 Conference in April 2019. Screenshot Images Courtesy of Facebook.
