While online shopping is nothing new, have you ever placed an order through a Whatsapp chat? This will soon be possible in India, where Whatsapp is currently developing into an e-commerce platform.
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In India, purchases can be made via Whatsapp in the future.
© Shutterstock.com/rafapress
In India, it will soon be possible to do your everyday shopping via Whatsapp Messenger. In a Facebook post, Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg announced the cooperation with the Indian e-commerce company JioMart – Techspot reports. In the future, users will be able to browse the catalog and place orders directly in the chat.
Shopping in chat – How it works
To start shopping, users start a chat with JioMart business account. You can browse the catalogue, add items to your shopping cart and make payment – all without leaving Whatsapp. Zuckerberg is certain that this way of communicating between companies and customers is the future:
“Business messaging is an area of real dynamism, and chat-based experiences like this will be the preferred way for people and businesses to communicate for years to come.”
In the footsteps of WeChat: will Whatsapp become the new super app?
The source of inspiration is quite clear. The messaging platform WeChat is a kind of super app in China. Not only can you use it to talk to friends, you can also make purchases, pay bills, rent a car, manage your own assets and much more. With over a billion users, WeChat is the second largest messenger worldwide.
But Meta also wants a piece of the pie. The cooperation with JioMart began two years ago when Meta (then still Facebook) acquired almost 10 percent of the shares in the company JioPlatforms. A subsidiary of Reliance Industries, which also owns JioMart. The companies came together to drive digital transformation in India and revolutionize how business and customers communicate. With 400 million WhatsApp users, India is the largest market.
Shopping via Whatsapp – soon also in Germany?
For Meta, the partnership with JioMart is also a test run. The results will certainly be analyzed in detail, because it has long been known that Whatsapp wants to expand its own business model. Since the app is free and does not run any advertising, sales have so far been limited. Meta has always been about access to the user base, but that could change soon. If the experiment in India is successful, Meta will probably expand the offer to other countries. In the long term, the app could undergo a transformation similar to WeChat, with more and more services being added as it progresses. However, Meta CEO Zuckerberg does not mention concrete plans as to when similar offers will also be available in other countries.
