Bad news, Founders. Facebook
allows only verified businesses
to run a Messenger bot
New obzrv.it release is getting delayed because of this. Pretty annoying.
It’ll be soon 2 weeks of my struggle with trying to make my Messenger bot public. Let me tell you the story: I had this idea a couple of months ago
Why not use Facebook Messenger to deliver notifications to users?
My service delivers notifications via email by default. Emails are slow. They get blocked by spam filters. It is an old technology — our grandparents used emails to communicate on front lines during Second World War. Old and not cool.
Mobile notifications are cool and sexy, on the other hand. People love them! (ok, until they become annoying) It would be great to send mobile notifications as well, next to emails.
So I implemented a Facebook Messenger bot. The technology is really nice and powerful. I had a lot of fun working on it. The bot replies to simple commands like “unsubscribe”, “mute”, or “history”. It also sends action buttons, so a user can execute action easily. Overall, a great user experience.
All went well, until I decided to make the bot public.
First it turned out they need to verify my service, and how am I going to use the bot. They ask you to create a test account for them, so they can login and play with it. Describe the use-case step by step. And record a video demonstrating how to use it.
Ok, a bit of work but doable. I had to resubmit my request several times before it finally got approval. It was weird — the biggest issue they had was that the bot did not reply to their messages. Of course it did not reply, because it wasn’t approved yet hence couldn’t reply to other people’s messages. How can testers not be aware of this?? They simply rejected my requests stating that “the bot is not responding”. In the end, I had to create a fake Facebook account, grant it “Tester” role for my bot (which, btw, also isn’t trivial: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/37676494/why-cant-my-fb-test-users-created-via-dashboard-access-the-fb-page-that-hosts), and include credentials for that Facebook account in my request. That finally got approved.
But it wasn’t enough.
Then it turned out they also need to “validate my business”. They want to know a company name, address and phone number — all proved by legal documents. Now that’s a bit crazy. I just integrated the service with Stripe, and can accept credit card payments with access to user’s data like names and emails. They did not require me to start a company. Just a bank account, and whether I want weekly or montly payouts. Nice. But now I need to start a real company, just to send notification messages via Messenger, because it turns out my service is “processing other people’s data”.
That’s it for now. I started the process, thankfully in Poland you can now start a company online and it takes 1 day. But I know it’s not all, as in the next step Facebook also needs to verify that my company is a “Tech Provider”. Whatever this means.
What was wrong with email notifications??
Thanks for reading!
The policy was introduced only recently and is described on their blog page: https://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/2023/02/01/developer-platform-requiring-business-verification-for-advanced-access/
