Facebook appears committed making Messenger its own full-featured platform, and today the social media giant revealed a number of new features that will give businesses even more ways to interact with consumers directly through the app.

The new Messenger Platform v1.2, which Facebook calls “an incremental but significant update,” adds a number of new features for businesses to take advantage of, including some new capabilities given to Messenger chat bots. These include the ability for chat bots to accept payments directly through the app.

“Payments can now be integrated into messages, making it easy for customers to shop and purchase without leaving the app,” Facebook product manager Seth Rosenberg explained in a blog post. Facebook assures both businesses and users alike that its payment system is secure, and that they “utilize industry-leading controls and financial information is protected with bank-level encryption.”

This is not the first time Facebook has allowed money to be transferred via Messenger, as the app has already supported small-scale payments between individual users. Now, however, this capability will be available at scale, allowing businesses to sell goods and services directly through the app.

The new payment feature will likely be good news for companies like Domino’s Pizza, which recently introduced a chat bot that allows users to order pizza through Messenger. Nicknamed “Dom,” Domino’s chat bot currently requires users to set up an account and payment information through the company’s web portal before they can actually order pizza through Messenger, but with the new payment processing update, bots like Dom would be able to accept that payment directly, making it much easier for the end user to actually start using the bot.

According to Facebook, the “Messages with payments” feature is currently in beta testing in the United States only, and the company plans on making the feature more widely available by the end of the year.

Other updates

Other new features added in the latest Messenger Platform update include UI improvements that are intended to make Messenger interactions more seamless for end users.

“Because while some interactions are better in a conversational format (like quick responses or intent capture), and some things are better suited for a permanent thread (like receipts, shipping notifications and flight updates), some experiences are truly better with a full-fledged UI,” Facebook said on its blog. “… Moving forward, we are also simplifying the payment and checkout experience in order to reduce the overall friction between wanting something and getting it.”

Facebook also added a function that allows users to share messages and even specific chat bots with friends by selecting a new “Share” bubble in their messages.

Image courtesy of Facebook