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Working with the Brussels-based communication agency Happiness, the Belgium ebay equivalent, 2deHands, has enabled promotion of items listed on its second-hand-sales platform with a feature that makes easy-to-use images to post on instant messaging. The ‘Chat with your Ads’ feature allows users to create sticker-like cut outs of the items they are selling. They can then share them with friends, family and potential buyers though the iOS instant messaging app. The item ‘stickers’ are interactive and if clicked upon, hyperlink directly to the listing on 2deHands.be.

2deHands is a free of charge Peer-to-Peer selling platform founded in 1999 and already well established in Belgium with a claimed 700,000 daily visitors. Spokeswoman for the company, Petra Baeck spoke of the increasing trend for stickers and emojis within messenger apps, adding “the Clickable Stickers instantly increases [user’s] visual communications repertoire in a fun and highly useful way by making individual stickers from their own actual item photographs that they can then share.”

As more conversations move away from social feeds to closed messaging, advertisers are eagerly scouting new ideas for how to monetise our conversations. By making their adverts as chat-friendly as possible, 2deHands makes a small but perhaps significant step in this direction. Other recent innovations in a similar vein have included a chat app for talking about shopping and a keyboard app that suggests relevant services as you type in WhatsApp. Is the industry on the cusp of cracking the thorny issue of monetising our chats and if so, which solution will make it to the mainstream?