Meta, the parent company behind WhatsApp, has just launched a grocery shopping facility for its popular chatting app for the first time. The social network giant joined hands with India’s Reliance Retail and Jio Platforms to bring JioMart grocery shopping to WhatsApp. It is only available in India for now.
Meta and JioMart’s joint venture originally started testing the feature with select users two years ago. It is now the world’s first end-to-end shopping experience on a popular messaging platform. WhatsApp users in India will now be able to browse JioMart’s entire grocery catalog on the app, add items to the cart and make payments without having to leave WhatsApp.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerburg said in a statement:
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.
As mentioned earlier, the feature is only available in India for now and it is unclear if it will debut in other countries including Pakistan. If it proves to be a success in India, it will more than likely make its way to other regions as well.
Meta is one of the biggest minority investors in Jio Platforms, which is India’s largest telecom operator with more than 400 million subscribers. On Monday, Jio announced that it would invest $25 billion to launch 5G services in India by October and aims to roll out the next generation mobile network in “every team” by the end of 2023.
JioMart, on the other hand, is a $221 billion Indian conglomerate that is meant to be a direct rival to Amazon and Flipkart.