Recently, Jio and Meta announced their alliance, claiming that Jio Platforms’ e-commerce project and the tech giant’s partnership will enable food purchasing via WhatsApp. They claimed that this will be the first end-to-end shopping experience in the history of the planet after launching the newly formed company.
JioMart is the name of the grocery shopping service, which has been tested by the firms for the past two years on a small number of consumers. The grocery shopping product is anticipated to have a large audience and substantial turnovers because both firms have significant sway over the Indian market.
This function has the potential to be a huge source of income for WhatsApp, which has long shunned monetization through adverts and other means.
Once an Indian user wants to buy groceries they can simply head over to JioMart’s WhatsApp grocery catalog and add whatever product they want into their cart. Once they are done, all they have to do is simply make payments using local services.
Used by about half a billion Indians, the Instant Messaging application holds a significant market size in the country and now with its own grocery store, the influence is only going to increase.
While this is great news for the country, it is indeed a bad one for current grocery delivery startups in the country. Now they aren’t competing with an ordinary competitor, but an industry giant that holds most of the Indian market even before it has properly commenced its business.
In a Facebook post, Meta CEO “Mark Zuckerberg” announced the addition of the new grocery service and said, “Excited to debut our relationship with JioMart in India. This is the first time we’ve ever done end-to-end shopping on WhatsApp. Now, customers of JioMart may place their orders directly through chat. Business messaging is gaining a lot of traction, and in the next years, chat-based interactions like this will predominate in how people and businesses communicate.
Users can only hope for the best when a well-known “social behemoth” and India’s most coveted brand join forces.
