Meta and Reliance Jio are bringing an end-to-end grocery shopping experience through WhatsApp, the popular instant messaging platform. Customers in India will be able to browse JioMart’s entire grocery catalog, add items to a cart, place order and make the payments all without ever leaving the WhatsApp.
“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.
Two years ago, Meta bought a 9.99% stake in Reliance Jio Platforms, the country’s largest telecom subscriber with over 421 million subscribers. On Monday, Jio also announced it will be spending $25 billion to debut 5G services in the country in October this year and aims to reach “every town” in the South Asian market by end of next year.
Mukesh Ambani, chairman and managing director, Reliance Industries also stated, “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,”.
Steps to shop on JioMart inside WhatsApp are as follows:
1. Sending ‘Hi’ to the JioMart number on WhatsApp.
2. The bot will prompt you to get started and check the catalogue. You can click on it to check different products and add them to your cart.
3. Afterwards, you will need to add your address and choose a payment method between cash on delivery, pay on JioMart and pay on WhatsApp.
4. Once payment is made, the order will be placed automatically.
