TechCrunch: Meta Partners With Jio to Launch Grocery Shopping for Indian Whatsapp Users
(Image Source: TechCrunch)
Meta is bringing the first ever end-to-end shopping experience to Whatsapp for Indian customers, following the latest deal with an e-commerce venture between India’s Reliance Retail and Jio Platforms.
Whatsapp is a popular instant message platform in India, with about half of a billion active users each month. Meta and JioMart have been piloting this new function with select users since 2 years ago. The UPI-powered payment service of the application was extended earlier this year, which put everything on track for the launch of the in-app shopping experience. If the initiative succeeds, it could become the major revenue source of Whatsapp, which has largely avoided serving ads to users:
“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, shared with the public.
JioMart is an Indian giant retailer, with the aim to take over the rein from Amazon and Flipkart in India. Its valuation is at $221 billion at the moment. While Ambani’s Reliance Retail is the largest local retail chain but its e-commerce appearance is limited. The new deal will help both marketplaces fix their problems. It also got support from the Indian authority, who aspires to have more control over Indian data, to implement the data-driven revolution.
“We have to collectively launch a new movement against data colonization. For India to succeed in this data-driven revolution, we will have to migrate the control and ownership of Indian data back to India — in other words, Indian wealth back to every Indian.” Ambani, an ally of India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi stated in a speech years ago.
Source: Meta and Jio launch grocery shopping on WhatsApp in India
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