WhatsApp Rolls Out Business Search | How To Search For Businesses on WhatsApp?

WhatsApp has been amping its game for the longest time. Be it smaller and sometimes unrecognizable updates to larger ones such as 1,056 participants supported in groups among others. One of the largest features to make it to the WhatsApp catalog is for finding businesses.

Until now, WhatsApp would let you check out the catalog, business-related information, and more if you have the contact number of the business. With the latest feature in place, you can literally search for businesses by location, category, or simple query the same way as you would on Google.

With the new feature in place, WhatsApp wants to eliminate the need for users to save the contact numbers of the businesses to contact. Instead, they can search for businesses on WhatsApp itself, chat whenever they want, shop for what they like, and more even without leaving WhatsApp for a second.

The feature is expanding to other countries so if you are a user in any of the eligible countries, you might have gotten their update. If not, you can wait as these updates might take some time. At the time of writing this, the feature is available in India, Indonesia, Colombia, Mexico, Brazil, and the UK.

Although the feature is still to appear for most users, it is already rolling out to many. Here’s how you can actually search for businesses on WhatsApp.

Step #1: First up, open WhatsApp on your device.
Step #2: Next, tap on the ‘Discover’ option and head over to ‘Businesses’ from the multitude of options available.
Step #3: You will have to select your location-sharing preference on the next screen.
Step #4: Once you are done selecting your location (that would enable WhatsApp to show businesses in the vicinity), hit “Continue”.
Step #5: Pick a location from the map.
Step #6: Search for a query or a business type such as ‘Courier’ and search for it.
Step #7: WhatsApp lets you refine your search further using filters available onboard such as open status, catalog, distance, and category among others.
Step #8: Tap on any business that interests you and tap on it to view its profile.
Step #9: Hit the ‘Chat’ button and you should be able to chat with the selected business right away.

If you haven’t noticed, WhatsApp has been adding a few major features over a couple of weeks. There’s a feature to add communities that you can add. Apart from that, you can tap on the ‘camera’ icon located in the top-right corner, capture a photo and send it to someone or set it as your status all without explicitly going to the ‘Status’ tab once.