India’s JioMart will now let customers order groceries using WhatsApp, a move designed to carve out a space in a market dominated by Amazon and Walmart’s FlipKart.
As Bloomberg reported Tuesday (Nov. 30), the service offers free delivery and no minimum order value, with products on offer including produce and cereal, and Indian cooking stables like chickpea flour and paneer cottage cheese.
The move comes nearly two years after WhatsApp owner Meta Platforms, previously known as Facebook, invested $6 billion into Reliance, which owns JioMart.
Reliance had announced it wanted to integrate JioMart with WhatsApp earlier this year.
Read more: India’s Reliance To Fold JioMart Into WhatsApp For One-Stop Shopping
“It is essentially [the] marrying of strengths for both companies,” Jayanth Kolla, founder of and partner at Convergence Catalyst, said at the time.
“The JioMart integration is essentially adding a retail layer for WhatsApp chats. With payments now available on WhatsApp, it makes all the more sense. Now your chats, retail and payments will all be integrated within the same interface.”
WhatsApp has around 530 million users in India, making it Meta’s largest user base overseas — while Jio’s subscribers number at more than 425 million.
Food and groceries make up about half of retail spending in India, a number projected to go as high as $1.3 trillion by 2025.
See also: New $54 Mobile Phones Could Broaden Reliance’s Reach In India
And Reliance could capture a larger share of that market with the recent launch of a simple smartphone that comes preloaded with WhatsApp and JioMart, built through a partnership with Google, which invested $4.5 billion into Reliance last year.
Bloomberg notes that WhatsApp is rebuilding its brand in India through Reliance’s assistance, following a series of run-ins with the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, which has accused the app of failing to properly police its content.
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