Rakuten Viber Acquires Chatter Commerce, The Startup Behind ShopChat

The Viber app’s parent company Rakuten Viber has acquired the e-commerce startup Chatter Commerce. Financial details were not disclosed, but the acquisition signals Viber’s hopes of further integrating shopping within the chat app.

Shopping right inside the Viber app was first made possible earlier this year with a feature called Instant Shopping. It was integrated through the app’s keyboard. The feature provides users quick access to local retailers’ catalogs and will let user shop/browse for products right on Viber’s keyboard.

That feature was made possible through the technology that’s being used by the service called ShopChat. Chatter Commerce is the very same startup that created the ShopChat service, making this new acquisition a complete circle for Viber.

Not only did Chatter Commerce already have connections with Viber before the acquisition, it was also heavily funded by Rakuten, the Japanese retailer company that purchased Viber back in 2014 for $900 million. Rakuten invested $1.25 million to Chatter Commerce during its initial round of funding back in March. The small startup only had seven engineers and they are based in San Francisco.

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With Rakuten Viber’s acquisition, Chatter Commerce’s team will now be joining Viber. This means that Viber might be planning on further expanding its e-commerce plans for the chat app.

“We founded Chatter Commerce on the basis that people should be able to do much more in their chats than what is currently available,” Chatter Commerce co-founder and CEO Zephrin Lasker said. “Rakuten Viber’s 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’s everyday lives.”

Lasker will now be the new global head of e-commerce at Viber. He will now “steer the company’s global mobile commerce strategy” and make sure that Viber is pushed into new markets, according to VentureBeat.

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Now that Rakuten owns both Viber and Chatter Commerce, it’s expected that the company will now expand the capabilities of the Instant Shopping feature. Viber claims that 30 percent of its users in the United States have used the feature since it launched.

The acquisition also comes at a time when instant messaging is now slowly becoming a platform for online shopping. Facebook integrated shopping features for its Messenger app by using bots and integrating other e-commerce services. Amazon on the other hand is already rumored to be making its own messaging service that comes with the company’s shopping features built right in.

With Rakuten Viber purchasing Chatter Commerce, the company appears to be preparing to compete with other major players in the market. Although Viber started out out as simple messaging service, Rakuten is a big-name retailer that’s already been dubbed the “Amazon of Japan,” so a direction towards an e-commerce strategy isn’t really out of left field.

Viber already has over 800 million users worldwide, and adding better shopping features could turn that number into dollars.