Meta launched the first end-to-end shopping experience 100% within WhatsApp, a tool that allows people to browse a catalog, add products to the cart and pay, all within the messaging service.
For now, it is available only in India and to customers of JioMart, a joint venture of e-commerce formed between RelianceRetail Y Jio Platforms.
The ad really momentous for the retail shopping businesswas made by Mark Zuckerberg himself on Facebook.
Buy 100% by WhatsApp
WhatsApp unveiled the new tool together with JioMart, which, as we said, is part of Jio Platforms, of the holding company Reliance Industries, an Indian technology firm in which Meta invested more than 5.5 billion dollars at the beginning of 2020.
The new tool allows consumers in that country to buy JioMart products and pay in a simple way, always within WhatsApp.
Previously, shoppers could search for products through the messaging app, but had to exit to complete the transaction.
Now, the shopping experience is carried out in an integral way within WhatsApp, a goal of Zuckerberg that has been developing for years.
Facebook paid $22 billion to buy WhatsApp in 2014, but messaging is a small slice of Meta’s overall business.
The app now makes money by charging some companies to send messages to their customers, and also by selling advertising that appears on feeds Facebook and Instagram users.
Those ads already earn Meta billions of dollars a year across all of the holding company’s apps.
The full ad from Meta Platform.
a new paradigm
But Zuckerberg’s idea is not to stay in India. The commercial opportunity of end-to-end purchases always within WhatsApp will look to expand into other large emerging markets where the app is popular, such as Brazil and Mexico.
The Facebook founder talks business messaging in almost every Meta quarterly financial presentation. He presents the idea as a line of business that will be complementary to the current advertising business.
“Business messaging is an area with strong momentum and chat-based experiences like this are going to be the way people and companies are going to communicate for years to come,” Zuckerberg said Monday.
The delays for the application of this shopping system within WhatsApp have an explanation: the regulation of the form of payment.
The company has been fighting for years in India to get formal approval from the government.
JioMart, the other player in this alliance, is a direct rival of Flipkart (Walmart) and Amazon.com in a market that has no limit to its growth. This association with WhatsApp could give him the boost he needs to stay in the race against the two giants.
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