Meta and an e-commerce venture between India’s Reliance Retail and Jio Platforms are bringing JioMart grocery shopping to WhatsApp in what they said was the global-first end-to-end shopping experience of this kind on the popular instant messaging platform. The launch follows Meta and JioMart beginning to test an integration with select users two years ago.
Customers in India will be able to browse JioMart’s entire grocery catalog on WhatsApp, add items to cart, make the payments via local payments rail UPI without ever leaving the instant messaging service, the companies said.
“Excited to launch our partnership with JioMart in India. This is our first-ever end-to-end shopping experience on WhatsApp — people can now buy groceries from JioMart right in a chat. Business messaging is an area with real momentum and chat-based experiences like this will be the go-to way people and businesses communicate in the years to come,” Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, said in a statement.
“Our vision is to propel India as the world’s leading digital society. When Jio platforms and Meta announced our partnership in 2020, Mark and I shared a vision of bringing more people and businesses online and creating truly innovative solutions that will add convenience to the daily lives of every Indian,” said Mukesh Ambani, Chairman and Managing Director, Reliance Industries at the company’s annual general meeting Monday.
“One example of an innovative customer experience that we are proud of developing is the first ever end-to-end shopping experience with JioMart on WhatsApp. The JioMart on WhatsApp experience furthers our commitment of enabling a simple and convenient way of online shopping to millions of Indians.”