'Kakao Talk will be money-making tool'
Lee Jong-won, a business strategy team leader at Kakao, speaks during a media conference in Seoul, Wednesday. / Courtesy of Kakao
By Jun Ji-hye
Kakao will transform the nation's largest messaging app Kakao Talk into a business platform through which it can conduct its business-to-business transactions and create revenue, the company said Wednesday.
Kakao Talk Biz Board (Talk Board) will be the first step toward achieving its goal.
“We will begin an open beta test of Talk Board within the third quarter of the year,” said Lee Jong-won, a business strategy team leader at Kakao, during a media conference in Seoul.
Talk Board is a service in which users can purchase goods or reserve things they want with a simple click in Kakao Talk.
The company carried out a closed beta test of the Talk Board starting in May, with a limited number of corporate partners participating.
Lee said partners from various industries participated in the closed beta test, experiencing the process that seamlessly connects users to their advertisements, which in many cases led to the purchase of the goods or services.
“The buying rate has been far higher when companies placed their ads in Talk Board compared to when running existing banner ads,” Lee said.
Kakao will turn the closed beta test into the open beta test within the third quarter of the year so more businesses can participate.
“Through the test, we will continue to advance the service,” Lee said. “We expect sales of Talk Biz to grow 50 percent compared to the previous year.”
Regarding concerns that ads placed in the list of conversations on Kakao Talk could cause inconvenience to users, Lee said his firm did not receive much negative feedback while running the closed beta service.
“This gave us confidence to carry on,” Lee said. “We will continue to collect the opinions of users to improve the service.”
Lee noted that the company tried placing the Talk Board in various locations of Kakao Talk during the beta test to study the responses of users, and finally decided to place it on the top of the list of conversations.
Besides Talk Board, chatbot and Kakao Sync services will also support the firm's business targeting corporate clients, Lee said.
Kakao Sync, unveiled by the company in March, helps users to easily sign up for a membership with partner companies.