WhatsApp Business has grown to over 200 million monthly users over the past few years. That means there are tons of businesses sending messages to users — and some of these messages could be considered spam. For customers, the only option was to either let them send messages and offers or block the business account altogether. WhatsApp is finally changing that.

The company is now testing new ways for users to provide feedback to businesses about what kind of messages they would want to receive — or not receive. This involves buttons like “interested/not interested” and “stop/resume” for some specific categories of messages.

Meta said it will begin testing interactions globally. For example, in the screenshot below, users can indicate whether they are interested or not interested in receiving “offers and announcements.” They can also choose to stop receiving this type of message altogether. In the future, users will have the option to resume messages if they wish to receive offers from a brand during a festive season.

Businesses can send messages through WhatsApp’s API based on one of these four categories: marketing (offers, new products), utility (order updates, account balance), authentication (one-time passwords), and service (customer inquiries).

While these categories exist in the back end, there was previously no way for customers to stop one type of message while continuing to receive others. For instance, you might want to receive purchase updates and authentication codes from an e-commerce site, but if you weren’t interested in marketing messages, you didn’t have the option to provide that feedback manually.

In countries like India and Brazil, a phone number attached to WhatsApp is the primary communication channel for many users, unlike email. While with email you get an option to unsubscribe from promotional emails, this option was not available in WhatsApp. This resulted in users being overwhelmed by spammy business messages.

The company has been considering introducing new controls for business messaging. In a conversation with TechCrunch in September on the sidelines of a WhatsApp Business event in India, Nikila Srinivasan, VP of product management for messaging monetization at Meta, hinted at this feature.

“One important thing we do is to give you transparency that you are interacting and engaging with businesses. Two, if you don’t want to interact with them, the strongest signal you can send is to block them and report them. This helps us understand that this is not a business you want on the platform. In addition to that, we are starting to think about how we can give more preferences to users to express more granularity,” she said.

Srinivasan also mentioned that educating businesses and helping them understand how some of their campaigns are not meeting the platform’s or users’ standards will eventually reduce spam.

Earlier this year, the company started restricting the number of marketing messages a person can receive in a day without explicitly defining the limit.

For a long time, WhatsApp marketed itself as a place for people to have personal conversations. Over the last few years, the company has introduced features to build and join communities, to broadcast messages as a creator or publisher, and, for businesses, to communicate directly with customers. Both communities and broadcast channels have their own tabs in the app.

However, business communication still shows up in the main chat inbox, and there is no way to filter it. In its Q3 2024 quarterly call, the company indicated that the WhatsApp Business platform is a key growth driver for its family of other apps revenue, which raked in $434 million in the quarter. The company will need to find a balance between making money and not alienating core WhatsApp users by bombarding them with business messages.

When we asked about this balance to Srinivasan, along with possibility of creating a separate place for business messages, she pointed out that several of the newer WhatsApp features are optional and separate from the main inbox.

“The core of what you want to do with WhatsApp is to be in your inbox. When I think about whether we would create a separate experience for businesses, I really love the inspiration that we have for helping businesses. Whatever we are doing in terms of educating businesses and investing in user controls is because we want the standard of what actually belongs in your inbox to feel really high,” she said.

You can contact this reporter at im@ivanmehta.com or on Signal: @ivan.42