Reliance's JioMart integrates with WhatsApp for order placement
Premium- A demo shared by JioMart showed that shoppers in select cities can start shopping on WhatsApp by chatting with a JioMart business account over the messaging app
NEW DELHI :
Online ordering platform JioMart has deepened its engagement with Meta-owned messaging app WhatsApp, allowing shoppers to tap and shop via a JioMart business account on the latter in a move that could drive greater adoption of the Reliance-backed online grocery channel in India.
At Meta’s Fuel For India event held virtually on Wednesday Akash and Isha Ambani relayed new features and pointed to further collaboration with the WhatsApp team to build native features that will not only help users shop seamlessly on WhatsApp but will also help retailers increase stock assortments and improve margins.
A demo shared by JioMart showed that shoppers in select cities can start shopping on WhatsApp by chatting with a JioMart business account over the messaging app. Shoppers then receive a “Start Shopping" prompt along with a catalogue of groceries and items of daily use. Orders will be offloaded to the nearest store or fulfilled from a network of Reliance Retail’s own stores, in some cases, it explained.
Digital shopping is now just an extension of messaging via WhatsApp to JioMart, Akash Ambani, director and head of strategy, Jio Platforms Ltd said.
“The JioMart experience through WhatsApp is actually, very simply put ‘conversational’ in nature. WhatsApp is extremely simple and easy to use. So there's no customer inhibition when ordering for supplies. It’s extremely intuitive —so there are no barriers to technology…," Akash Ambani added.
JioMart’s integration with WhatsApp—that has a user base of well over 400 million people in the country—could further raise the stakes in the fight to gain dominance in country’s online and offline retail trade.
JioMart currently has over half a million small mom-and-pop retailers that use its platform to order goods to their stores. In January Mint had reported that an integration of WhatsApp with JioMart was under works.
All a customer needs to do is to just order away on JioMart, said Isha Ambani, director, Reliance Retail and Jio Platforms Ltd.
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“Bread, butter, vegetables, beverages, everything that you need in your household that day or that week...Look up a product, set up a subscription for a regular buy if that’s what you want, or get personalized recommendations based on your past purchase history, it’s all there," she said, at the virtual chat hosted by Marne Levine, chief business officer, Meta.
The integration, said Isha Ambani, is a step close to her father, industrialist Mukesh Ambani’s vision of enabling millions of small retailers to become digital first via Jio and JioMart.
JioMart is an online selling channel of Reliance Retail Limited. It was launched in May 2020. In April 2020, Facebook Inc. had bought a 9.9% stake in Reliance Industries’ digital unit Jio Platforms for $5.7 billion.
JioMart engages with small retailers, acting as a distributor by supplying products to retailers. It also facilities B2C orders to end consumers that are then passed on to retailers. In a sense, the platform intends to aid both mom and pop store owners to order goods as well consumers to buy goods.
On the business-to-business side, JioMart has been actively gaining ground.
In some markets, such as Gurugram, the online ordering platform has garnered more than one-fourth share of distribution for retailers within six months of partnership with them, according to a recent report by Kotak Institutional Securities. It cited cheaper product pricing when compared to other distributors for small shops to engage with JioMart as a distributor.
The Kotak report noted that JioMart has also started extending invites to select consumers for shopping over WhatsApp. These users, it said, will be able to order groceries via a ‘tap and chat’ feature on the app.
The sway of the Reliance-backed tech platform over India’s traditional distribution has however met with resistance.
Last week, All India Consumer Products Distributors Federation or AICPDF—an industry body that represents dealers and distributors of fast-moving consumer goods companies—wrote an open letter to FMCG companies highlighting issues faced by offline distributors on account of business-to-business companies such as Jiomart, Walmart, Metro Cash and Carry, Booker, Elasticrun and Udaan that “indulge unethical predatory pricing" and “potentially destroying the traditional distribution network in the country".
In an open letter to companies such as Hindustan Unilever Ltd., Marico, Dabur India, ITC Ltd., Britannia Industries, Godrej Consumer Products Ltd., Nestle India, etc the industry body has called for a non-cooperation movement from 1 January against FMCG companies if their concerns are not addressed.
On Wednesday, Akash Ambani said with new JioMart features retailers will be able to get new orders in addition to keeping their relationships with their regular user base intact.
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