Code found in Snapchat’s latest update by Ishan Agarwal pointed to Snapcash shutting down in the near future, and a representative for the company has confirmed that the feature is indeed set to be shut down on August 30. An additional confirmation was given by payment company Square, Snapchat’s partner in the venture. Leading up to the sunsetting, Snapchat will be notifying users about the change in order to give them time to move away from Snapcash and find a suitable alternative, if they do use it.
Snapcash was originally meant as a way to send money to friends on an immediate basis for things like splitting a restaurant bill, but in the service’s four-year lifetime, it has been used for a number of unintended purposes. Some of these cases of misuse even fall into legal gray areas, such as selling explicit photos, and of course, since the app does not force the user to verify the details of a transaction, usage for other illicit things is obviously possible. The service also didn’t seem well-positioned to see a lot of usage. Competitors included the likes of Facebook Messenger, Paypal, Venmo, and even Square’s own personal payment app, Square Cash. While Snapchat did not give an official reason for getting rid of Snapcash, it stands to reason that the service was likely not seeing enough traffic to justify the ongoing expenses involved in maintaining it. Legal liability issues could also have been at least part of the reason.
Snapcash’s main purpose was sending money peer-to-peer, but Snapchat can still be used for shopping. Functionality that allows for hosting storefronts and adding payment methods to the app is still intact. On top of that, Snapchat’s seemingly upcoming “Eagle Eye” functionality is able to pull up product listings for products that are found in pictures, which means that Snapchat still has at least some focus on ecommerce features. Snapchat is not the most popular social platform on Android by any measure, so pursuing a unique feature set not found in any similar apps could help Snapchat to stand out among a crowded arena of options for users.
