WhatsApp Rolls Out In-App Shopping Product With India’s JioMart
WhatsApp, the popular messaging service owned by Meta Platforms Inc., is rolling out a shopping product in India, the first time users will be able to browse and purchase groceries and other household products without leaving the app.
WhatsApp unveiled the new tool alongside JioMart, part of Reliance Industries Ltd.'s Jio Platforms, an Indian tech company that Meta invested almost $6 billion into in early 2020. The new feature lets users in India shop for products from JioMart, and pay for them directly within the app. People could previously browse products via WhatsApp, but had to leave the service to finish the transaction.
Having a full-blown shopping experience inside WhatsApp has been a longtime goal of Meta Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg. The social networking giant paid $22 billion to acquire WhatsApp in 2014, but the service is still a small part of Meta's overall business. The app now makes money by charging some businesses to message customers, and also by selling click-to-message ads, which are ads that appear in users' Facebook or Instagram feeds and then kick them into a private chat with a business once they're clicked. Those ads already bring in billions of dollars per year across all Meta's apps.
Zuckerberg is targeting a much larger business opportunity for WhatsApp related to commerce and payments, especially in emerging markets where the app is popular like India and Brazil. The CEO has spoken about business messaging on almost every Meta earnings call in the past few years, pitching the idea as a complementary business line to the company's existing advertising business.
“Business messaging is an area with real momentum and chat-based experiences like this will be the go-to way people
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